This recipe is from a friend

It makes a chocolatey puff of air

It's what dreams are made of

It's the absolute height of fall at the moment, and in fact it's a little past-we've already had first snow a week ago. Thankfully, it's warmed up again, so I hope to get some last bit of CSA-goodness before the cold season starts in full swing. It's hard to find time to bake random stuff, but it's good that my weekly visits to the farmer's market yields lots of pictures.

because a friend loves cheesecake, i decided to make some.

AND plus cream cheese was so cheap i had to buy some.

digestive cookie crust,

one cheesecake batter divided into 2 and flavored with baileys and coffee, layered into mini muffin silicon moulds,

and baked up into a gorgeous piece.

note to self: next time, if one batter is obviously denser than the other, just follow instinct and put the heavier one at the bottom. don't just layer it any way you want because it might look pretty.

i used 1/4 cup of baileys for 2/3 of this recipe, and while taste-wise it was perfect, the fact that there was only 1 tablespoon of concentrated coffee in the other half of the batter meant the alcoholic one was much wetter than the coffee one. in this case, the bailey's batter goes better on top because otherwise the coffee will sink into it and threaten to mess up the pretty layers.

just an addendum, the flavors in both batters are wonderfully strong and yet subtle. people will pick up on the flavors as according to their tastes, and i had people only picking up on the alcohol, or only on the coffee. good for telling who's an alcoholic, or a caffeine-addict since they'll be more sensitive to the other one.

i still have no internet available at home (tilll wednesday!) which would explain the long hiatus in blogging. devoid of pretty things and eventful days i have picked up baking with a vengeance once again, and this time using my favorite poppy seeds.

i bring you poppy seed sandwich cookies.

these are very simple in conception: a nice plain-ish cookie, sandwiched with filling of your choice. this was off 101cookbooks, which by the way is a blog that inspires me to cook a lot healthier and try out new and alternative flours etc., and was a simple cut-out cookie recipe with a simple melted chocolate filling.

mix up the easy batter, which came out very easily, chill it for at least half hour, cut out the shapes, and bake till golden brown. how much easier do you expect it to get?

i didn't deviate from her recipe because it looked so good and had just the right amount of poppy seeds: not so many that you couldn't enjoy the speckled look, but not so few that you didn't know they were there.

after baking and cooling, leave those pretty cookies on a plate and bring out your jar of nutella.

oh come on, you know you have one in the cupboard.

i used the jar of nutella i had as a filling so that i wouldn't keep eating eat it right out of the jar. heidi on 101 uses melted chocolate which i think would work great as well, but i haven't found anything that quite takes away the place nutella has in my heart.

and be generous with it.

place as much as you can without the nutella oozing out. although if it does, you could always just lick it off your hands.

when you have cookies this pretty, you almost don't want to eat them. almost.

i gave these away as a housewarming gift for a friend, and it was finished in 10 minutes. don't doubt the power of nutella.

Behold- the encyclopedia which I borrowed and have not read. Another unaccomplished fall break assignment... well, to some extent. Seeing as I have been unable these past few days to wake up at an early enough hour to start my dough, I tried a recipe from this book. It turned out pretty good! I guess because focaccia is basically all about the quality of olive oil used...

I learnt this from a cooking class organized at my school. It's typical Mauritian cooking, and the recipe is really simple. I don't think its too unfair to post it online, because there are similar ones available and it's no family secret or anything. Try making it, it takes about 20 minutes on the stove and 5h in the fridge before you tuck in.

 Tastes somewhat like the real thing, but isn't. So no recipe is provided until I tweak out the problems. Trouble is, I don't understand the recipe, it's in Japanese. So I went online to the first google search result and the recipe was a poor one (I'm not going to slander it, though).

Finally, back from hiatus! Here's a slice of milky, airy cheesecake- the way I grew up eating it. I just can't understand the love for American-style cheezy cake.