The Great Norwegian Cheesecake-capade

Today (May 17th) is Norwegian Constitution Day and as Sue is Norwegian, we must celebrate! In this case, she has decided we're to make a tri-colour cheese cake for the occasion and for the BBQ this afternoon. So last night became something of an escapade while making it and spawned a number of other things too.

Most cheesecakes have a crushed biscuit base, but this seemed a little tame for our adventurous step into the world of crazy cheesecakes. After a few different ideas, we settled on COOKIE DOUGH!

Being a bit rushed, we decided to use a dough mix, and make it better. The mix called for an egg, some oil and some water. Instead of water, we used a water substitute for extra flavour. After mixing, it looked a little dry, better add more...

RUM! Far better than water.

The mix came together much better and filled the tin about 1/4" deep.

The cheesecake mix was a pretty standard affair from the BBC site, with 900g of cream cheese, 3 eggs (plus 2 yolks), some creme fraiche and vanilla extract.

Mmm, gloopy.

To make the tri-colouring effect the mix was split into three bowls, and then food colouring added. At least it would have been, if I'd had any in the house. On closer inspection of the baking cupboard, the food colouring had disappeared, so we used whatever we had, That turned out to be alcohol!

The red was made with Chambord and when that wasn't enough (just a pale pink) some blended frozen raspberries from the freezer. The white was pretty simple, but so as not to spoil a good idea, Absolut Citron went in along with some lemon peel. The blue was... troublesome. While I had a lot of blue curacao in the bar and it did start making it a pale blue, the more that was added, the greener it got.

At this point, the red is looking ok after roughly half the chambord and frozen raspberries, plus some potato flour to rethicken the mixture. The white is looking as white as ever, really a sort of pale cream colour, and the blue is still pretty green and thin. More potato flour fixed the consistency, but obviously not the colour.

After an 11pm trip to Tesco Newbury we came back with blue food colouring, among other things (more on that later), and the poring could begin.

The first two colours worked perfectly, nice concentric circles, but once again, the blue wasnt done with trying to screw me. It was still a bit too thin and going into the fairly thick white layer it spilled over the top a little and didnt stay confined where it was poured. In retrospect it should have gone in before the white, or been thickened more.

But on the plus side, it did bake pretty well. 10 minutes at 180C, 40 minutes at 140C and then 10 more about 160-180 to set the top a little more.

Hopefully by the time you're reading this, i'll have cut it and can see the results of the pour in cross section. If it worked, hurrah! if it didnt, at least i've got a reasonably boozy cheesecake.