Recipe: Blueberry Swirl Cheesecake Bars

Me and baking have an on/off relationship. I still remember all of my first attempts at baking and they all turned out horrendous. I even managed to mess up a premade banoffee pie that I basically just had to assemble! These days, things turn out a lot better, but it's still a rare occurrence that I bake something, as I tend to make the biggest mess in the kitchen whenever I give it a go. However, this cheesecake was worth all of the flour behind the counters and the spilt milk and broken eggs. When my friend said she wanted to take this cake to Vegas and marry it I knew I was on to a winner. The recipe was taken from the June issue of BBC Easy Cook magazine. If you don't like blueberries, feel free to substitute other fruit such as strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries or even pineapple!

For 10-14 bars (depending on the size of your cake tin) you will need:

• 300g digestives
• 140g melted butter
• 275g caster sugar
• 100g blueberries (or other fruit of your choice)
• 1tsp cornflour
• 900g full-fat soft cheese
• 4 tbsp plain flour
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 200ml sour cream

Throw the biscuits into a food processor until they turn into fine crumbs, then pour in the melted butter and whizz until it becomes a sticky mixture. Alternatively, if you don't have a food processor, you can bash the biscuits in a freezer bag with a rolling pin and mix with the butter by hand in a bowl.

Line a deep baking tray with parchment and then spread the biscuit mixture over to form an even base. Press it down with a spatula or the back of a spoon and try to get it as even as you can. I tore off some of the baking paper in order to be able to take better pictures, but you may want to leave some overhang, as it will make it a lot easier to lift the cake out of the tray. Bake for 10 minutes at 180C fan/ 200C conventional/ gas 6.

Meanwhile, we can crack on with our blueberry sauce. Mix the cornflour with a little bit of water, then add to a saucepan with the berries and 25g of the sugar.

Heat up and let the mixture bubble while stirring constantly until the berries crack open and release their juice and the sauce becomes thick and syrupy. Then remove from the heat.

By now your base should be ready, so lift out the golden crispy deliciousness. Let the base and the blueberry sauce cool off completely before you continue.

Now we're gonna get started on the main event. Look at all that cheeeeeeeese....

Get a big bowl and whisk the soft cheese until it becomes smooth. Add the sugar and whisk some more. Finally, add the flour, vanilla, eggs and sour cream and whisk again until you're left with a smooth mixture like the one in the picture above.

Pour half the cheesecake mixture over the biscuit base, then dot half of the blueberry sauce all over. Top with the remaining mixture and then add some more blobs of blueberry sauce. Use the tip of a spoon or a knife to create little swirly patterns. Then get this baby in the oven and bake for 10 minutes at fan 180C/ conventional 200C/ gas 6. After that, turn the heat down to fan 90C/ conventional 110C/ gas 1/4 and bake for another 30 minutes. Then turn off the oven and leave the cake to rest in the warm oven for an hour. Lift it out and wait until it's cool enough to put in the fridge, where it should be left for at least 3 hours or ideally overnight - if you can wait that long!

Slice into bars and serve! Enjoy the ooey, gooey creamy deliciousness. Granted, this might not be the healthiest of recipes, but this stuff is seriously worth it. And what would life be without a little naughtiness from time to time, eh?

Let me know in the comments below if you decide to give this recipe a go!

Hello Fresh Food Subscription Box Review

In my April Love Me Beauty box I received a £25 money off voucher for Hello Fresh, a subscription box service that sends you all the ingredients you need to cook 3 or 5 meals a week from scratch. They include absolutely everything, from fresh produce down to little extras, herbs and spices, as well as detailed recipe cards with step by step instructions on how to cook your meals. While I always thought it was a brilliant idea, particularly if you're constantly faced with the trouble of figuring out what to cook, it was always the price that put me off. At £39 a week for three meals for two people, it works out at £6.50 a meal - when I do my regular shops our meals tend to work out at half of that, if not less! Without the voucher, I don't think I would have ever taken the plunge to try this service.

My first initial experience was not a positive one. Sign-up was quick and simple and I liked that you could swap over recipes that you knew you wouldn't like, so I could cater for my boyfriend's tastes, as he is an incredibly fussy eater. I was advised my box would come on Tuesday between 9 and 5 o'clock,  which was great as I was off work for the whole day, so could get my delivery and not have to do a food shop that day. Five o'clock came and no box.... Six o'clock, still no box. Eventually I gave up waiting and phoned customer service, who then told me that my box would be with me on Wednesday, as it was a bank holiday weekend - which wouldn't have been a problem, if someone had bothered to tell me. I was told by the man on the phone that they usually send out a text, but must have the wrong contact details. He didn't, however, bother with taking my contact details to check.

I got off the phone and I was fuming. Nobody messes with my food! I had to, err, make other arrangements for dinner that night (read: order a takeaway), and my box did eventually arrive early Wednesday morning.

Vegetables, baked goods, herbs and spices were packed loosely in the box while all the meat and dairy was wrapped with ice packs in a plastic bag lined with woolcool liners. I already know these from my weekly Abel and Cole deliveries and they work really great at keeping all your produce cool, so I know that even if I wasn't in all my stuff would have been fine till the evening.

These are the recipes I got in my box along with pictures of how it ended up looking when I made the meal.

Swingball Meatballs with Smoked Tomato Linguine

I made this recipe a day after receiving my box and unfortunately by that time the carrots had already managed to go mouldy! Thank goodness that I still had some carrots in my fridge that I could use, but I wasn't overly happy with my delivered vegetables not even being able to make it past the first day.
The actual dish was fairly easy to prepare, although it did require a lot more chopping than I would have liked. I tend to grate my carrot and I don't usually put celery in any of my tomato sauces, as I hate the taste of it. For the sake of following this recipe to a T, I left the celery in there and I admit that once it had cooked into the sauce it wasn't quite so bad. Unfortunately, I found the finished sauce to be quite bland, so I had to add what felt like a ton of salt and a gallon of hot sauce to improve the dish.
To be fair though, that's not something I blame Hello Fresh for, as I always have to add tons of seasoning to any shop bought ready meals and it's not really that much of a problem to add some spice to your food. The actual pasta was absolutely amazing - some of the best I've ever tried and the meatballs were very lovely as well.

Umami Burger with Rustic Chips and Rocket Salad

My boyfriend hates anything that's remotely healthy, so I had to leave out all the salad for him, but still he didn't enjoy his meal. Like I said, he's a fussy eater! I actually thought this was absolutely lovely! Adding garlic salt onto potato wedges is something I am forever going to do from now on. This is the first time I've ever used Umami paste and while it tastes absolutely revolting on its own, it did add a very special flavour to the burger. I've since also added it to mushroom sauce and it tasted absolutely divine! I think this was my favourite meal out of the three.

A Really Special Chicken Fried Rice with Pistachio and Sesame

This is the recipe I made last and by the time I'd gotten round to it (about five days after my box got delivered), the spring onions looked like they were on the brink of death and I had to throw half of them away. To further add to my annoyance, the recipe included way more chopping than I would have liked and I also found the cooking process very unnecessarily long-winded (for example: I would not usually wait for half an hour to cook chicken thighs in the oven before adding them to a stir-fry, but rather chop them up and fry them in a pan for five minutes).
I did really enjoy this dish in the end, although I had to add a lot of salt again to make it a bit less bland. As you can see on the picture above the portions on this one in particular were huge! I really struggled to finish my meal and that's even though I hadn't eaten since breakfast.

You certainly can't fault Hello Fresh on portion sizes. They are very generous and filling and although I had to add extra seasoning to pretty much all of my meals, I found them to be rather tasty in general. My boyfriend didn't enjoy any of them, but as I said, he's an extremely fussy eater who won't touch anything that's not meat, bread or cheese. Overall, the quality of the ingredients was top-notch, apart from the vegetables. For a box that's meant to last all week to include vegetables that go mouldy after a day is really not acceptable.

I think my biggest peeve with the box is the price. £13 a day for two people is just extortionate considering you've still got to do all the cooking yourself. Even if I was shopping in Waitrose or Marks & Spencer's every day I'm pretty sure I could feed us both for less than that. Hello Fresh did include a card with my box detailing how a comparable shop would be more expensive in pretty much every supermarket, but I just find that very hard to believe. Add to that my experience of rather poor customer service and you can see why I cancelled pretty much as soon as I got my box and won't be looking to resubscribe anytime soon. While I still think it's a great idea, the value for money just isn't there with this box.

Recipe: Creamy, healthy spring greens soup

Happy Easter, everyone! It's Sunday and that means it's time for another lifestyle related post. This time I thought I'd share with you a recipe for a tasty green soup which is healthy, filling, easy to make and delicious! I got the original recipe from Popsugar Fitness, but I adapted it a little bit to suit my tastes and needs and I'm very pleased with the result and will definitely be making it again.
(NB: A saucepan may or may not have been accidentally set on fire during the creation of this post. I guess I'll never be one of those swanky, sophisticated food bloggers, oops!)

For two portions you will need:

• Half an onion
• Half a small, green chilli (I used birdseye)
• A drop of olive oil
• About 5-6 leaves of chard or spring greens
• A good handful of spinach
• 500ml vegetable stock
• 1 tsp smooth peanut butter
• 1 tbsp low fat cream cheese

Start by finely dicing the onion and the green chilli. Remove the pith and the seeds from the chilli if you don't want too much heat, or use a whole chilli if you want it a little hotter!

Saute the chilli and onion in the olive oil in a saucepan over high heat until the onion becomes translucent. Keep stirring to prevent it from sticking.

In the meantime, start chopping your chard or spring greens, depending on which you're using. You want to separate the crunchy white stems from the leafy green bits. Add the white bits to the pan with the onion and the chilli and saute for another 3-5 minutes.

Add the green bits to the pan along with the spinach. Heat, while stirring until all the spinach has wilted, then turn the heat down to medium.

Add the vegetable stock to the pan, cover and let it simmer for about 5-10 minutes.

Turn the heat down to low and add the cream cheese and peanut butter. Stir well to dissolve any lumps.

Transfer about half of the soup into a blender and whizz until smooth. Alternatively, if you have a hand blender you can just puree it right there and then in the saucepan.

Return to the pan and turn the heat up one last time until the soup starts bubbling away. Adjust seasoning if you need to, though I find that the peanut butter, veg stock and cream cheese make it salty enough, while you get a little heat from the chilli.

And tuck in! Serve with some bread if you're really hungry or just slurp on its own. It tastes rich, indulgent and creamy and definitely not like a healthy recipe.

I wasn't too sure about the peanut butter at first, but it turns out that it goes beautifully with the green vegetables adding an almost meaty taste to a vegetarian dish.

Let me know in the comments below if you decide to give this recipe a go!