March 6th - White Chocolate Cheesecake Day

I knew today was going to be a good day! White chocolate and cheesecake are both excellent in my books. We have a friend staying with us for a week so it seemed like a nice idea to make a big home cooked dinner and dessert. After a quick Google I settled on this recipe (mainly because it said it would only take 15 minutes, spoilers: it lied) and got to work:

First I made the buttery biscuit base (link) using malted milks, one of the most underrated biscuits in my honest opinion.

We then pushed it into the bottoms of the moulds (which may or may not be old Gü cheesecake containers).

I whisked together the creamy ingredients and then (while I licked the whisk) put it on top of the biscuit mix.

Then blobbed strawberry jam in top and put in some sliced strawberries. The corner store didn't have raspberries but that wasn't a problem as far as I was concerned.

Look how nice they are!

So at this point I had white chocolate cheesecakes but the next instruction was 'Refrigerate for a minimum of four hours.' The recipe said 15 minutes at the top so I hadn't considered chilling time. They were pretty soft so I decided to listen and bunged them in the freezer for an hour as a compromise. I wasn’t intending to take them out of the dishes other than to eat them so I figured they didn’t need to be as firm.

An hour later we ate them and they were good!

White chocolate cheesecake day… 9/10 there's other flavours of cheesecake I'd pick over white chocolate but the fact that this was a slightly obscure flavour meant I had to make it myself which was fun and I hadn't done in years.

January 3rd - Drinking Straw Day

Today has been drinking straw day! The famous holiday…of straws…

So this one took a little bit more planning than I anticipated as the UK has recently banned disposable plastic ones so I couldn’t just pick some up at the supermarket.

In England, it is estimated that annually we use 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds. An estimated 10% of cotton buds are flushed down toilets and can end up in waterways and oceans.

Even though non-plastic alternatives are readily available, these single-use plastic items are used for just a few minutes but take hundreds of years to break down. Cleaning up the effects of littering costs local Government millions of pounds every year.

In order to eliminate these items from use, the Government intends to introduce a ban on their distribution and sale. The ban would come into force at some point between October 2019 and October 2020, subject to the views collected during consultation.

(https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-plan-to-ban-plastic-straws-cotton-buds-and-stirrers)

In the end David was my saviour when he swiped some from a McDonalds near his office last night. And they say romance is dead! I forgot to drink my cup of tea this morning with a straw as I was half asleep but bought a milkshake this afternoon as it seemed an appropriate drink to drink with a straw. I then later had another cup of tea using it. The heat was a bit wierd through a straw and the slight strawberry after taste was also…odd. The paper straw wasn’t holding up too well after that so I abandoned it half way through.

Trying to remember to drink through a straw and the practicalities were a bit difficult but I hadn’t fully appreciated just how many plastic straws had been being used before. I also hadn’t really considered the effects of single use cotton buds and although I’m sure a ban will be coming in the near future that would have forced me to change, I’ve gone ahead and ordered bamboo ones today!

All in all, regular straws 0/10, paper straws 6/10.

(I believe metal straws may be the way of the future if you are into such things. As I’m not overly attached though, paper will do me fine on the occasions where I can’t go without!)

January 1st - Hot Toddy Day

Day 1 is hot toddy day! I don’t drink regularly and not particularly a fan of whisky but start as you mean to go on…

THE RECIPE

Put 1 tsp of honey and a measure of whisky in a mug or heatproof glass. Add two cloves and half a cinnamon stick then top up with just-off-the-boil water. Stir in a slice of lemon and just enough lemon juice to balance the sweetness of the honey. Drink as soon as it doesn't burn your lips.

(https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/13/nigel-slater-classic-hot-toddy-recipe)

I ended up making a slightly bastardised version of the recipe, as I’m going to be doing this for a year I want to do it as economically as possible. We’ve had some whiskey knocking about from a friend staying with us last year so I went with that, substituted the honey for maple syrup and used ground cloves instead of whole.

All in all…Hot Toddy a surprising 9/10, would drink again!