I made a chocolate cheesecake

I'm trying to make things rather then buying them. I have visions of hosting dinner parties and being a wonderful hostess. I have got these visions because I watch too many life style programmes and too much 'Come Dine with Me'. I'm starting to think lifestyle programmes are dangerous, they raise my expectations so high. I'd probably do myself less damage if I just watched trashy reality TV.

Anyways I've been trying to perfect a chocolate cheesecake recipe that I got from the Good Food website. By the way, I'd recommend that you use their recipe - don't try and copy mine. It has not gone well and the long term health effects of semi melted smarties/minstrels have not been studied.

Malt Chocolate Cheesecake

I've made it a few times now with my own variations each time. There was the infamous smarties cake. Nice but unfortunately the colour ran off the smarties and on to the cake, mostly off the blue ones. When you cut into it, it looked a bit like you'd slaughtered a smurf. I tried a version with white chocolate buttons. This time I decided to use Galaxy Minstrels, because for some reason I'd forgotten about the shell issue.

As you can see it also ran, but I don't think it's quite as bad as the smarties cake. At least it's brown on brown. I could almost pass it off as deliberate.

Professional looking isn't it. Isn't it?

Unfortunately I don't think I used enough butter for the biscuit base. It was somewhat crumbly and had to be prised off with a pallet knife. Which incidentally I had to be over 18 to buy which I think is ridiculous. It's not even a proper knife, it's not even sharp, it's just a thin metal spatula really. Anyway . . .

Crumbled base which foiled the pallet knife's attempt to lift it off the cake tin

 This left a small cavern at one side of the cake. Luckily it hasn't caused the cake to fall over and there is enough base left for it to stand on it's own.

Cake cavern

I'm not too displeased with this latest offering. It's not as bad as my recent cookie disaster in which my cookies spread out on the baking tray so far that they formed one giant mega cookie, mostly over the base of my oven.

Like much of my food, the chocolate cheese cake looks a bit funny but it tastes nice. Which they could put on my tomb stone to be honest - it sums me up pretty well.