Kitchen Catt; after dark (...with artificial natural light)

Three weeks seems like a much longer time than I really appreciated; it feels like I'm crawling back to this platform after a year-long barefoot quest through the Gobi Desert. Actually, I was just finishing off my masters thesis (which, I feel is kind of an equivalent process to fighting monstrous sand worms). Perhaps starting a food blog while I had university work to be doing wasn't a great exercise in personal responsibility, but hey, I got six posts churned out before thinking "maybe I should review my priorities...?"

So, with that out of the way, welcome to post number seven! You may have noticed that this is the first "after dark" chapter of this culinary chronicle. While this suggests at many potentially thrilling avenues, I'm actually only alluding to the fact that I have *acquired* a light-box, meaning that I can take non-fuzzy pictures of food during those unspeakable hours of darkness. I'm not sure I can actually publish the story of how I acquired this, so I'm going to let your imagination fill in the blanks here!

Last quick piece of housekeeping; I'm going to change up the structure of these posts a little bit. Whereas before I had a block of free writing and information about the dish, before the recipe itself and the adjustments section, I'm going to combine the first two sections from this post onward. This feels like it'll make the sections flow a bit more. Besides, we can't trace back the Ancient Mesopotamian roots of everything we put in our mouths, can we?

So, my "after-dark special/comeback" recipe is actually what put the idea of starting a blog into my mind when I first made a slightly different version of it a few months ago. Originally it started as a braised fennel dish somewhat in line with the Shanghai-style of cooking. This adaptation, which I've tentatively termed Braised Fennel Udon is a significant departure from that. I like to think of it as a flight from Saigon to Osaka with a stopover in Shanghai, which I'd love to say is because of my strong international outlook, but really it's because I'm indecisive about ingredients and I just crossed my fingers that they'd all work together. Udon purists, you may want to sit this one out.

Braising is a relatively recent discovery of mine, first introduced to me from Nigella Lawson's 'Garlic Mushrooms with Chilli & Lemon' (recipe is not online, but can be found in her book Nigellissima). The term basically refers to the application of dry heat (from frying), followed by wet heat (from shallow stewing), and in terms of both texture and taste sometimes it can be exactly what is needed.

What's that I hear you say? "But you just did a recipe with aniseed!" Uh, yes. Yes, I did... But, as much as I loath to talk about a flavour I like by promising that you can't taste it too much, the braising element means that it's just one part of a whole palette of tastes on offer here. The braising liquid takes much of it's inspiration from Southeast Asian, and particularly Southern Vietnamese, cooking with a few Chinese and Japanese additions that I might have accidentally spilled into the wok (I guess I'm just kinda awkward and clumsy like that, tee-hee).

Braised Fennel Udon - Recipe

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Serves 1-2

Ingredients

• 100g of dried udon noodles

• 1 large fennel bulb, or 2 small bulbs (approximately 400g)

• 125g of shiitake mushrooms

• 2 red chillis

• 1 medium stalk of celery

• 3 cloves of garlic

• 1 inch piece of ginger

• Leaves from 4-5 stalks of Thai basil

• 1 tbsp of shaoxing or saké (for other alternatives, see notes below)

• 1/2 tbsp of soy sauce

• 1 tbsp of mirin

• 1 tsp of fish sauce

• 1/2 tsp of oyster sauce

• 2 tbsp of vegetable oil

• 1 tbsp of sesame oil

• Salt

• MSG (optional)

Set a bowl aside for your aromatics, these will be fried in the oil together. Crush the garlic

cloves before finely chopping.

Halve and de-seed one of the red chillis and finely chop into small pieces.

Peel the ginger and finely chop into small pieces.

Break off a stalk of celery, and finely chop into small pieces.

Finally, cut off the green stalks from the top of the fennel and cut off the ends. Finely chop into small pieces before adding the aromatics to the bowl.

Cut out the base of the remaining fennel bulb before chopping coarsely. You want these pieces of fennel to be much bigger than those in the aromatics bowl.

Wash the mushrooms and cut them into smaller pieces. Shiitake mushrooms vary a lot in size; for most it will be most appropriate to cut them in two, however larger ones can be quartered and smaller ones can be just left as they are (there is something incredibly satisfying about a dish with adorably small mushrooms that have remained intact, don't you think?).

Cut the top off of the remaining red chilli before slicing it horizontally to create thin circular pieces.

Pour both kinds of oil into a wok and warm over a medium heat, before adding the contents of the aromatics bowl. Fry on a medium heat for about 3 minutes. This is so that the ingredients can flavour the oil.

After the aromatics are done, add the fennel into the wok. Stir until coated with the oil, before adding salt and turning up to a high-heat. Add shaoxing/saké, soy sauce, mirin, fish sauce and oyster sauce and bring to the boil. Once this is boiling (this won't take long), cover the wok and turn down to medium-low heat. Keep covered and simmering for 8 minutes.

At this point, you can put your water on to a boil to cook the dried udon. This will only take 5 minutes once the water has come to a boil.

After the fennel has simmered for 8 minutes, add the mushrooms and the chillis to the wok and stir until coated with liquid. Bring the wok to the boil, cover, turn down to a medium-low heat and simmer for a further five minutes.

While the wok is simmering, pluck the leaves from the Thai basil. You can chop these if you'd prefer, but I think the leaves are great whole. When the simmering is finished, stir the Thai basil into the mixture and cook for 1 minute.

Drain the udon noodles, and add them into the wok, stirring them into the mixture. You may find a pair of cooking chopsticks more helpful than a wooden spoon here to ensure that they're fully integrated.

Empty into your preferred bowl, leave for a few minutes to cool, and enjoy!

Notes

• There are a lot of potential adjustments here, but most notable is the shaoxing. This is an aged Chinese cooking wine made from fermented brown rice. You can find this in UK supermarkets (most often, I see it in Tesco) but it's usually much cheaper if you can find a Chinese or a Thai supermarket nearby. Other things that can be used are saké as specified above, dry sherry or vermouth (if you like a dry martini, the latter might be the option for you!)

• The mushrooms by no means have to be shiitake. I used them hear because I think the chewiness really lends something textually, when the fennel tends to meld together. I think that oyster mushrooms would also be great, and chestnut or white would be fine too. If, forsooth, you don't like mushrooms then aubergine would be a fabulous substitute with a silkier texture.

• This recipe does have a fair bit of heat to it, so if your spice tolerance is quite low then I would suggest that you leave out the first chilli, and just use the horizontally chopped one.

• You could use other noodles here, however I think the udon noodles do a great job of intermingling with the braising liquid.

• Thai basil can be found in some UK supermarkets. I usually see it in Tesco or Sainsbury's but you could also find it in a Thai or Vietnamese grocery store.

• I would not be offended if you were to top with with a fried/poached egg.

Porous boundaries.

Today, I'm writing in my parents' living room; a domain where natural light is scarce, but a softly-humming stillness seems, somehow, to be a silent inhabitant.

My parents' blinds, and our view of a drab, yet geometric, council estate.

A few years ago, my grandfather had to move in with us. Our house is small(ish) and we had to build a new bedroom within the boundaries of the garden, bracketing off a portion of the light that would usually filter into the living room. Fast-forward to the present day, my parents' have installed blinds in the opposite window thus limiting the brightness further.

I live in a flat in South East London; a home where the white walls try their very best to mimic the light-from the outside. On clear skied days they overachieve, becoming near-pearlescent the eyes and residual senses of a light-sensitive, fledgling writer (who feels hesitant to even call himself that). I haven't been writing for long, but these past six blog posts have come from different settings and I'm finding it interesting to tease out the feelings which come from each.

Now, on to what I originally intended to talk about... vegetarianism.

Why am I talking about vegetarianism today? I'm talking about it because of a contradiction that is wholly unnecessary; one that I get the feeling anyone who imposes conditions on their diet has probably dwelt upon at some point.

Since May 2016, for all intents and purposes, I have adhered to a vegetarian diet. I can track this because I had to wait until after sister-of-the-blog Lynsey's wedding where I had pre-ordered a meat-based main (whoops!). I was almost at the end of my three years undergraduate study, and practically everything I had cooked had been meat free. It seemed to me that the choice between spending £3 on a pack of chicken (any other meat would have felt wildly decadent) or 60p on a couple of tins of lentils/chickpeas/ambiguous-pulses was pretty clear. Adaptation was no issue.

Largely, nothing has changed. I don't find myself, as 2019 approaches its close, in a state of dire repression. Though occasionally I may walk past a fried chicken joint and think "hmm, that smells pretty good", I don't wake up at night emerging from a herbivorous nightmare. I don't feel somehow cheated after eating a tofu or lentil-based meal. I'm pretty content to keep going on largely the same.

Okay, so why am I writing this then? Other than to obnoxiously humble-brag about how I'm "sooooooooooo content" with my meatless lifestyle. I'm writing this because of fish sauce. As in, I purchased a bottle of it. I then opened this bottle. I sprinkled a small measure into a meal I was preparing. And "what happened to this meal" you ask? I ate it. I, the vegetarian, consumed a fish-based condiment. Somewhere offstage (off-blog...?) someone has blanched and fainted at this shocking new development.

Though it seems insignificant, this crossed that I had set up for myself. When we breach these lines, we tend to get met with a lot of confusion; I can hear the voices of *certain* people I know drawling "but I thought you were a vegetarian?" Oddly enough, these gatekeepers of dietary purity also seem to be the same people who give people grief for choosing to limit their diet. Whatever this represents to other people, to me it seemed like the first step into becoming more flexible.

Flexibility for me represents my ability to choose for myself how I'm going to limit my diet. I don't think I'm going to eat meat; that's still off the table, although the idea of "cheat-days" will probably always be floating not far above my head (I've had one since becoming a vegetarian, and yes, it was fried chicken...). The bottle of fish sauce is perhaps the perfect figurehead for this choice as it embodies a taste I felt I couldn't replicate through a vegetarian diet, so I made an exception. I haven't really made any other long-term exceptions yet, but it will be on my mind for sure.

Flexitarianism is a very well-established term now, but I'm not sure it describes what I am. Even so, I think I'm less worried about setting down a clearly demarcated palisade than I am about taking things on a case-by-case basis. Although the context is slightly different, back in 2017 there was an interesting article (click here!) in the Metro about "selective veganism" and I think a lot of the points transfer neatly to vegetarianism.

The point in the article about disordered eating sticks out a lot to me; it's a good reminder to first set out the parameters of what is healthy for us before we begin thinking about ethics. And, as much as I talk about flexibility, I do think everyone should be thinking about ethics. However, it's about doing something rather than doing everything.

As a last note, I want to say that you don't need to justify your diet to anyone (though, if you find that meat is your default go-to for food, then now is certainly the time to change that). If you do want to follow a wholly vegan diet, then that is perfectly fine and can be done in healthy, exciting and sustainable ways. I'm not trying to say that flexibility is a prerequisite, but I think it makes it a whole lot easier to start attuning our eating habits to contemporary issues (which I'm sure we're all aware of, but for good measure I'm going to quietly link a few articles here - click here! or here! alternatively, here!)

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Flat Noodle Papaya Salad

Here, the relevance of the bottle of fish sauce becomes clear!

Green Papaya Salad is a dish common in Southeast Asia and, though the precise origins are unclear, it's thought to have originated with the Lao people who (unsurprisingly) reside primarily in Laos. This is also very commonly encountered in countries such as Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam (where I had it for the very first time!) Originally an amalgamation of local sour ingredients, hence the centrality of the unripe papaya, however the Columbian Exchange (which I think is an incredibly sanitised name for something that spread undesirable phenomenons such as disease and genocide) brought non-native ingredients into the mix.

This is where I come in, along with my own "non-native ingredients", though I hope I will be far less destructive in my recipe-creation. I reflected upon how the papaya salad could be made more substantive. Though this has been done numerous times with rice noodles, the Thai flat noodles we had in our cupboards seemed more fitting.

I want to disclose, that although green or unripe papaya is really supposed to be used here, my papaya was regretfully somewhat ripe. A green papaya is vegetal, with a slightly-carrot like texture. As it ripens, I feel a more melon-esque taste begins to emerge. This is not necessarily ruinous so if you find that your papaya has ripened then carry on as usual; you'll still get a great result! But, if at all possible, try and find the unripe stages of the fruit (this may mean a trip to an Asian grocer - which is not possible for all).

As for the fish sauce, it's kind of the same situation as the ripeness of the papaya. You could leave it out (and I will provide my idea for an alternative, as always!) but I think it does bring something unique to the table.

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Ingredients & Method

Preparation time: 20 minutes.

Confession: so, there is a carrot in this picture but I decided not to use it.

Serves: 1-3 (this really depends on how you're serving it)

• 1 papaya (ideally green)

• 100g of Thai flat noodles

• 2 red chillis

• 2 spring onions

• 1 red pepper

• 4 cloves of garlic

• Handful of coriander

• 2 limes

• 3/4 of a tbsp of fish sauce

• 1/2 a tbsp of sesame oil

• 1 tsp of palm or brown sugar

• Handful of peanuts

• Salt

Before you prepare the vegetables, put your flat noodles on to boil. Usually this will only take about 3-4 minutes once the water has come to a boil. Drain the noodles and rinse them through with cold water in order to get rid of the starchy residue (this will make them less sticky). Once they have been rinsed thoroughly, put them in a large bowl.

Next, prepare the papaya. The best way to do this is to peel the skin off, before cutting it in half. The centre will be pregnant with plump, ink black seeds. Scoop out the seeds before cutting the papaya julienne style. The riper the papaya is the, the harder this will be to do

however precision is not a concern here! Just make sure to cut in relatively-thin strips. Add to the large bowl.

Remove the core and seeds before slicing your red pepper and your red chillis in the same fashion, making sure to cut in long thin strips. Add to the bowl.

Slice up your spring onions. I think it is best to use coarse slices on the green parts, before going finer as you get to the thicker, crunchier white ends.

Remove the stalks from a handful of coriander and chop finely.

Crush your cloves of garlic and mince, before adding everything to the bowl once more (really you can add your ingredients to the bowl at any time but I think it's best to do as you go - AND allows you to make snazzy photo grids such as the one below, which may not be a grid if you're reading on a phone...)

Mix everything together.

Now, time to make the dressing. Squeeze the juice out of two limes. Sometimes I find limes can be quite firm which can be challenging if you don't have a juicer (which I don't). My strategy is to push into the flesh with two thumbs and attempt to turn the lime inside out. This will get a larger amount of juice out than just squeezing.

Mix in the sesame oil, fish sauce, sugar and a pinch of salt and mix together until the sugar had dissolved. Pour over the salad and mix through once again, making sure everything is coated.

Finally, roughly cut up a handful of peanuts and mix them into the salad.

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Adjustments

• This can be made vegan by removing the fish sauce. If you do remove this, I recommend substituting the same quantity of light soy sauce and a 1/5 of a tsp of MSG (if you have it to hand). This will replicate (to an extent) the salty-savoury flavour that fish sauce brings to the salad.

• The peanuts are non-essential if you are allergic or not partial. Other ideas for garnishes are sesame seeds and torn pieces of sushi nori.

• Other vegetables can be used in here. I *almost* used a carrot in my recipe but decided against it. Versions of this dish are also served with cherry tomatoes, which I don't enjoy that much in their raw form so I left them out.

• By all means, try this with other types of noodles (I'm thinking rice or soba...) or even without noodles, if you so dare!

"Is it set...?"

I have a bit of an irregular history with cheesecake. As a child, I'm sure I was aware of them. For me, and probably for a lot of children, they were the first exposure to an ingredient (cheese in this instance) appearing in a context that we wouldn't conventionally expect to find it. It softened the blow for when we discovered that people actually pair sweet syrups with salty meat, and that jam tastes delicious inside of a mature cheddar-cheese sandwich (if you haven't discovered this yet, then please do go and try it). The list could go on for eons.

For me, I was not at all resistant to the cheesecake. Bizarre as the concept may have seemed, the concept didn't really throw or disgust me. As a somewhat fruit averse child, I may have rejected the ones that came with a strawberry or orange coulis in favour of the ubiquitous toffee variety, but on the whole I welcomed this "new" variety of confection.

While this may have seemed somehow revelatory to me, the veritable cheesecake has laid deep tracks on the pathways through time. An Ancient Greek physician named Aegimus, alive around the 5th-century BC. was said to have written a treatise on the art of making cheesecake. At this point, I think I need to send a thank you to both professional classicists, and also those who contribute to the intellectual commons by translating ancient sources.

Cato the Elder, who was a Roman senator and soldier, included recipes for what would now be known as cheesecake in his manual on how to run a farm under the name of a placenta (placenta is the Latin work for "cake" so please do not be concerned by this). As you can expect, this diverges somewhat from what we know now as a cheesecake. The base is made from a wheat flour pastry, presumably because digestive biscuits were not easy to find in Ancient Rome, and this is wrapped around the whole of the cake. Then sheep cheese is soaked, dried, kneaded and sieved and mixed with a liberal amount of honey. Thin strips of pastry (which, I'm imagining resemble filo) are arranged in layers with the honey-cheese mixture, before the whole thing is wrapped, baked and garnished pleasantly with oiled laurel leaves.

If you wish to attempt a recreation of the Roman Cheesecake, the full translation of the recipe can be found here. The good folk at Tavola Mediterranea (the self-described online "home of culinary archaeology") have provided a deciphered recipe to follow to make the process considerably easier (click here!) Though a lot of Cato's career was predicated on preventing any spread of Hellenic culture, the combination of sour cheese, honey and pastry seems to have shades of traditional Greek cooking (I feel that this will be incredibly unsurprising to any classicist, but I got a C in my AS Level Classics, so...)

These are recipes from 1390! Please don't ask me what they say.

Down the line, forms of cheesecake have also appeared in a 14th century recipe book collated by the chefs of King Richard II (click here!), with the name cheesecake becoming used roughly 100-years later. Around the 18th century, the yeast was replaced as a leavening agent by eggs, and it evolved to bear a closer resemblance to its contemporary form. We think of New York, when we think of cheesecake; it was actually created unintentionally in an experiment designed to replicate French mould-ripened cheeses (such as Camembert!) This is a process that I'm sure many "accidental cooks" can relate to!

Anyway, back to me. I am neither Roman Senator, nor a chef in the late Medieval royal court. But I DO have a somewhat chequered history with cheesecake (remember when I mentioned that in the opening paragraph and proceeded to talk about something entirely different? so random). Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but in recent times I have had two incidents with the dessert that have brought a reluctance to approach it again.

I'm going to implicate good-friend-of-the-author Bee in this first story, and I'm sure she won't mind because she has video footage of part of this. With a full keg of, probably unwarranted, confidence (we had successfully baked cookies before and believed we were invincible) we decided to make a cheesecake out of quark, by which I mean the acid-set cheese not the fundamental constituent of matter. Let's just say that we ran into difficulties that were not completely unrelated to curdling. The explosive video footage, expertly documented by Bee, was of me opening the spring-form tin we had baked the "cake" in and emitting a despairing whine as the structural integrity of our creation was compromised. Truly scarring. In an astonishing twist, Bee did not take any of the "________ (insert name here)" home with her.

The second story, upon reflection, seems ridiculous. I had made a mango-topped cheesecake for my brothers birthday last year (I don't talk to my brother much, so I guess my entire motivation was because I saw this as a potential redemption arc) and this time it was a no-bake one. I just had to leave it in the fridge while my family went out for dinner, right? Surely it will be fine? The infamous spring-form tin features again as a gatekeeper of tragedy here. We had just come home from the train station where we had been threatened by and had to flee from an intoxicated man, so the cheesecake was the last chance to salvage the night. I don't like to use the word "seepage" lightly, however this was the primary theme of it's revelation, as the cream cheese mixture flowed freely from its confines. Unpleasant for sure.

So, why am I trying this again? I don't have a very satisfying answer. I had just been thinking about cheesecake for about a week before then (why? who knows?) and I don't particularly like the affordable cheesecakes that can be commonly bought that much. So, with insufferable arrogance, I took this back into my own unproved hands (and spring-form tin - YES, I used it again!).

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Chocolate, Blackberry and Liquorice Cheesecake

Okay, so the immediate and probably warranted question that lingers here is "why make a complex cheesecake? why not a normal one?" and, yes, I hear you. However, my thought is that the difficult thing about making a cheesecake is implicit regardless of the flavours and features (I hope this quells any potential #NotAllCheesecake related uproar). I could just as easily fail on a plain cheesecake, and what would be the point of writing a recipe for that?

This cheesecake is a riff on Nigella Lawson's Liquorice and Blackcurrant Chocolate Cake (which is not available online, but is included in her Simply Nigella book, which I can promise contains at least 100 other great reasons to buy it). I find chocolate cake pretty boring, to be honest, so it takes a fair deal of persuasion for me to make one. I have great trust both in the power of liquorice and the wisdom of Nigella, and therefore a couple of years ago I DID make this, and it was sensational. The liquorice and the blackcurrant both cut across the chocolate before it crossed the boundary into the "overly-sweet" territory.

Why didn't I just make this cake again? Well, as mentioned previously, my mind was firmly lodged in the cheesecake mire and had been rotating through potential flavours like a roulette wheel that refused to stop spinning. However, the triumvirate of liquorice/chocolate/blackberry grabbed the wheel, stopped its perpetual revolutions and forced me to see sense. Of course, this was the adaptation to try!

Obviously, liquorice is controversial. I do want to say that eating this cheesecake is worlds apart from biting into a stick of liquorice (though, I find that pretty enjoyable too). The flavour it brings is very slight, and I like to think of it as building a bridge between the blackberry and the chocolate flavours - which, admittedly, is hard to imagine until you've tasted it. If you didn't know the ingredient list, you may not know it was there, but the role it plays is important.

That being said, I think if you were to trade the liquorice for some kind of spice then it would result in a creation that is different but probably just as good! We all have flavours that we just aren't a fan of, and that is fine. As per usual, I'll note some adjustments after the recipe - or if you can think of any I haven't specified, then by all means go ahead with them! That's what cooking is all about, and it is how we evolve (in more of a culinary than a Darwinian sense though). Just so you know, I buy my liquorice powder at Grape Tree which is a store fairly commonly found across the UK.

Lastly, I'm trying very hard not to apologise for this, but I do want to acknowledge that I made this over two days, and therefore isn't a quick bake. However, the time that it is setting in the fridge requires no conscious effort from you, and you are free to spend it at your leisure!

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Ingredients & Method

Time taken: 12-24 hours.

Spot housemate-of-the-blog Rebecca who taught us all about the difference between mist and fog a couple of posts ago. What a hero.

Biscuit Base

• Two 154 g packets of Oreos

• 2 tbsp of caster sugar

• 85 ml of melted butter

Cheesecake

• 250 ml of whipping cream

• 400 g of cream cheese

• 230 g of caster sugar

• 1 tbsp + 1 tsp of cocoa powder

• 300 g of dark chocolate

• 5 tbsp of liquorice powder

• 1/2 tsp of salt

Blackcurrant Topping

• 300 g of blackcurrants (either fresh or frozen are fine)

• 3 tsp of cornstarch

• 2 tbsp of brown sugar

• 50 g of granulated sugar

• 2 tsp of lemon juice

• 1 tbsp of liquorice powder

• 1 tbsp of aniseed liqueur such as Sambuca or Ouzo (optional)

• Pinch of salt

To begin with, make the biscuit base. This is so it has time to refrigerate before the cream cheese mixture is set atop of it. Begin by melting your butter in the microwave. While this is happening, remove the cream from your Oreos and set them aside.

Once the cream has all been removed, firmly but moderately crush your biscuits into a coarse grind. I used the flat end of a rolling pin to do this, but any heavy implement will be fine. After the Oreos are all crushed, add the debris to a bowl and mix with the sugar and melted butter.

When the mixture is combined, add to a 9-inch cake tin and press down so it lays relatively flat (you can use your hands for this part). Put the cake tin in the refrigerator and let cool while you make the cake mixture.

Pour your cream into a mixing bowl and whip until it increases in volume and forms stiff peaks. This will take about 5-10 minutes if you don't have a stand mixer (which I don't), but you could also use a handheld whisk or electric mixer. Set aside.

Melt your chocolate using the bain marie method (I always think of the Vietnamese banh mi sandwich when I hear this). Break your chocolate into squares and then bring a small saucepan of water to the boil. Lay a heatproof dish over the top. This should touch the water, but not cause it to overflow.

Add your squares of chocolate to the dish, and mix around slowly as they melt. This may take a bit of time, but melting chocolate straight in a saucepan or a microwave can cause it to burn. This should be left to cool for about 15 minutes while you mix the remaining ingredients.

In a separate bowl, mix together the cream cheese, caster sugar and salt. Set this aside and return to your chocolate. When this has cooled sufficiently, mix completely into the whipped cream and add the cocoa powder, stirring until completely combined.

Fold the cream cheese mixture into the chocolate cream until completely combined. Add the liquorice powder, making sure it is evenly distributed.

When everything is mixed together, spoon your mixture on top of your refrigerated biscuit base. After it has all been added to the tin, use a flat spatula to level the top. As a topping is going to be added, don't worry if it isn't perfectly smooth; it doesn't need to be! As long as it is relatively even then it will be fine.

Put your cheesecake in the freezer and leave for at least 12-hours. This may well be an overly cautious suggestion (many people attest that only 4 hours is needed) and you can try shorter setting times out, but I give my official recommendation to the 12-hour suggestion (or overnight). Now, you have space to do whatever you like! Have fun. Learn new skills. Sleep. Who cares? This is your time.

Now, after the refrigeration time (I hope you got a chance to relax and have fun), it is time to prepare the blackberry topping that will adorn the cheesecake.

Begin by stirring together 3 tsp of cornstarch with 2 tbsp of water and set aside. This will be used to give the topping a more viscous consistency and prevent it from running down the sides.

Meanwhile, in a medium sized saucepan, add the blackberries, both varieties of sugar, aniseed liqueur (if not using, replace with the same quantity of water), lemon juice, liquorice powder and salt. Heat over a medium high and bring to a boil, before simmering for 4 minutes. At this point, the berries should be releasing their juices and breaking apart somewhat.

Add the cornstarch mixture to the berries, and stir over a low heat until it thickens. Remove from the heat, decant into a bowl and leave to cool in the fridge for 30 minutes. Once this has cooled, pour over the cheesecake and leave in the fridge for another 2 hours for the topping to set.

Once the cheesecake has had a chance to sit, cut into slices and serve!

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Adjustments

• As mentioned previously, the aniseed liqueur is optional. Really, only use this if you have it to hand! If not using, replace with water, or perhaps even lime juice. If you have it to hand, then some ground star anise would replicate the aniseed flavour.

• This could potentially be made with other berries; chief in my mind is that cherries would be a suitable replacement (which would veer towards black forest territory).

• The liquorice powder could be replaced with any number of spices. Allspice would give it more of a wintry shade, whereas cloves would bring out the fruitiness of the blackberries.

• Oreos aren't vital. I was initially reluctant to use them, but after I confronted some illogical prejudices around biscuits that are named after a brand (rather than what they are, e.g. digestives) I realised they were probably the correct way to go. However, the field is wide open for experimentation.