A Couple of Christmas Recipes... Tried and Tested.

Before you start to wane at the mention of MORE festive cheer these recipes (though they worked great for Christmas) were not particularly Christmassy so I thought I'd share...

Goats Cheese and Red Onion Tarts:

Recipe I found here. I used the same pastry recipe as I did for my mince pies and I garnished the dish with rocket dressed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil. This was a bit of an "IN YOUR FACE LAST YEARS PREGNANT ME!!!!" and it was goooooood.

 White Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake:

This recipe started out as this recipe but as recipes do it evolved to...

Ingredients

180g Digestive biscuits
75g butter
200g Raspberries
120g Sugar
500g Cream cheese
200g White chocolate
1/2-1 tsp vanilla extract

Crush the biscuits. I used a blender, you could bash them in a sandwich bag with a rolling pin.

Melt the butter and mix the crushed biscuits in. Spread around the bottom of a 20cm cake tin and bake at 180 for 5 minutes. Leave to cool.

Mix the sugar, cream cheese and vanilla in a bowl. Again I used a blender (love that thing) but you could do it by hand and work off a few of the impending calories.

Melt most (Leave a few squares for grating later) of the chocolate (microwave or on the hob) and fold the melted chocolate and most of the raspberries in to the mixture. Don't mix too much. You want the chocolate swirled through and the raspberries kept whole.

Chill overnight.

Decorate with left over raspberries and grated chocolate.

VOILA! Unbelievably good cheesecake which takes NO longer than half an hour! :D