I have had an incredibly sucessful morning in the kitchen and I just felt like sharing.

Today I made cheese for the first time.  This is hopefully the beginning of something beautiful.  It reminds me of the first loaf of bread I made when I was 7.  This was a very simple cheese to make - much like cottage cheese.  Thanks to Jean Mansfield from the highly recommended book How to Make Cheese and Other Dairy Products.  Bring 1 1/2 litres of full cream milk to the boil and then turn off the heat.  Add 2 1/2 T of lemon juice.  Stir gently with a wooden spoon.  Let it cool for 5 minutes.  Then poor the liquid through a sieve.  Let is drip for a while and then transfer the cheese to a container.  Add some salt to taste.  Magic.  I just had some crumbed in my salad and it was delicious.  Has a lovely lemony after taste.  The remaining whey and there is quite a lot of it can be put to good use.  I'm going to boil up my potatoes in it to give them a lovely creamy flavour.  If you Google - uses for whey - you will find all sorts of interesting things including using it to clean your hair!

My other creation is equally exciting.  I am not very good at baking.  I always seem to get the quantities wrong or drop the whole lot on the floor (which I did last week).  To add insult to injury my husband prefers my friend Alison's cakes to mine.  Unfortunately we seem to have some kind of sixth sense as we always end up baking the same kind of cake at the same time.  This week we both decided to cook cheese cake.  We decided to called it the Cheese Cake Off.  Naturally my competitive nature came out so I Googled - Best Baked Cheesecake in the Whole World Recipe.  And you know what - I think it just might be.  Absolutely nothing went wrong - nothing.  And it looks wonderful.  It will be taste tested tonight at our weekly neighbourhood board game night so I'll let you know what the neighbours think.  My husband has already had Alison's cheesecake before and reckons it will be hard to beat.  Someone just might be sleeping in the spare bedroom tonight.  The cheesecake was easy to make so feel free to contact me for the recipe or you could just do the same Google search that I did.



Happy baking.