Chocolate Brownie Cheese Cake

Micky made this cake for a dinner party to celebrate the second half of Succot... we were lucky enough to have leftovers brought home! I absolutely love a good Jewish baked cheese cake, so when I cut a slice I tried to spoon out that part from the chocolate. Cheese and chocolate? I wasn't too sure about that. I am now however sold, ka'ching! The cheese cake part was soft and moist, and then came the chocolate. The chocolate brownie texture that I love... dense and chocolaty but not too rich, with crumbly melt in your mouth edges. The sweet flavour of the chocolate with the softer more "savoury" flavour of the cheese balanced this cake out beautifully.

Cheese Cake Ingredients:
250g creamed cheese (30% fat)
250g cream cheese (5% fat)
100g melted butter
3/4 cup (150g) sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
3 eggs
1 tablespoon (10g) corn flour

Chocolate Brownie Ingredients:
300g dark chocolate
200g butter
4 eggs
1 cup (200g) sugar
1 cup (240g) dark brown sugar
1 1/4 cup (180g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (100g) chopped walnuts (optional)

Cheese Cake
Mix the cheese, butter, sugar, vanilla essence and eggs together
In a separate bowl mix the corn flour with a cup of the cheese mixture, then combine it all together

Brownies
Melt the chocolate and butter together
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the white and brown sugar then add the melted chocolate
Add the flour, baking powder, salt and mix together. If you chose to add nuts, add them here

Put 2/3 of the brownie mixture into a greased baking dish
Slowly pour the cheese mixture over the chocolate
Spoon the rest of the chocolate mixture on top
Bake at 170 degrees for an hour until the cheese is brown and the whole cake is stable. Cool and put into the fridge for at least 2 hours

Persian Food

This has been food I dream about. This little Persian stall that is open on Thursday and Friday mornings as part of the food market in Dizengoff Centre, Tel Aviv. I arrive there today and one of the ladies helping spots my African pendant... oh, South Africa she says. You must be hungry! With that we were handed teaspoons of different rice dishes to taste, sweet and savoury. My all time favourite though are the Dolmades. These little vine packages stuffed with spiced rice and what I think may possibly be some raisins, are served hot out the pot. I may be so full from the lamb and rice dish that I chose (enough to serve two!) and say that I have had enough of that to satisfy me for life, but for those vines I will most certainly go back!

Sun Downers and Snacks

After a long walk around old Jaffa with views of Tel Aviv, we found a relaxed spot to have sun downers along the beach. Now I am not the biggest drinker, so I prefer to choose things where the taste of alcohol is masked nicely. I ordered a frozen strawberry daiquiri thinking that maybe it would be similar to what I have had back home. It wasn't... but I was pleasantly surprised. This was more of a strawberry smoothy made with frozen yoghurt and I suppose a shot of something somewhere. It was good! After a long day it is never good to drink on an empty stomach so a few starters were ordered. I remember having fried cauliflower back home, made by our Israeli friends... but my goodness were these delicious. Served hot out the pan with sweet chili sauce, I don't think I went too many bites without saying YUM! Chumus with techina and chickpeas came along with pita bread of course and lastly were some spicy chicken wings. I know you can see cutlery in the picture, but trust me this was far better eaten with your hands ; )

 

Date Balls

These must be one of my all time favourites. I love the fruit and when they are turned into these little sweet crunchy balls I love them even more! Here in Israel it is never difficult to get them, they are available all year round in what looks like a vacuum packed loaf of dates... the one item I got pulled aside for when leaving Israel one year as I suppose through an x-ray machine it looked like drugs. Really? Dates!

Ingredients:
250g butter
1 cup (250ml) sugar
2 packets pitted dates
1 egg
1 packet marie biscuits
coconut

Melt the butter then add the sugar and melt
Add broken dates to pot, switch plate to low and keep stirring until dates have broken up
Allow to cool
Add beaten egg
Add crushed maries and cool
Roll into balls and then coconut

Put them into the fridge to cool, or even store them there as they are a lot better cold.

PS enjoy them with a cup of five roses tea : )

Frozen Yoghurt

One of my favourite things to eat on a hot Summers day (even though Israel is currently in Autumn, but yet it's still sweltering outside) is Israeli style frozen yoghurt! What I love about this yoghurt is that there is no artificial colouring or flavouring in the actual yoghurt itself. What you decide to add on top of it though is all up to you... there are all sorts of toppings from sweet things like chocolate, chalva and nuts to the healthier option of fruits like melon, sabre (prickly pear), pineapple, berries and peach to mention a few. When you are done choosing your toppings you are able to add syrups, I generally like to stay away from these but they have things like caramel, chocolate and strawberry. My best is to select a few fruits and then add jelly babies which need to be squished down into the frozen yoghurt where they get all hard and extra chewy : )

Druze Lunch

Arriving in Israel after the New Year means that there are a lot of holidays almost one after the other. I was up in the North for the start of Succot and as a "tourist" was taken out for the day to the Golan Heights. We spent the morning watching a movie of what the Golan has to offer. An experience that reminded me of Disney World where they put on big fans to give you the feeling of wind, spritz you with water and let you smell the flowers as part of the experience. This was followed by a trip to Mount Meron where you get to see what the bunkers that the soldiers have to live in during the war are like. You are able to see the Syrian border from up there... when you look into the distance everything that is green and flourishing is part of Israel and everything that is brown is part of Syria. Not for lack of anything on their side, but because Israel works at changing the land to support her people.

When lunch time came we found ourselves in a Druze Village closer to the Chermon Mountain. We started off with falafel balls that were soft, really green inside and thoroughly delicious. This was accompanied by pickled vegetables, olives and fresh bread with a sweet red pepper and tapenade (olive) paste. Yum! One of my favourites was then brought to the table... Labaneh drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with Za'atar, accompanied by pita Druzit (thin bread). By this stage I had already eaten so much... but the mains were still to come. In Israel Chumus is considered a main, unlike in the rest of the world where they eat it as a dip. We got one plate of Chumus with Techina and chickpeas, another with fried mushrooms and a third with beef, this was eaten with a salad, chips and although I stayed away from more carbs there was also soft fluffy pita breads! Betay'avon.