A recipe for mini lemon cottage cheesecakes made with blood oranges was discovered online, using cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs and honey, resulting in a delicious treat for afternoon tea.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
Jaci Hicken, our seasoned journalist and trained chef, shares her wealth of knowledge on growing, cooking, and preserving homegrown produce. This week, the blood oranges are still falling off Jaci’s tree, sitting on the bench and staring at her.
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I still have the same complaint.
When starting this tree-change lifestyle, one could not imagine a time when there would be too much food, with the drive to do something with it so strong.
The food stares at you on the kitchen bench as it accumulates, yelling ‘cook me, cook me’.
At the moment there is a basket of blood oranges, mandarins and cauliflowers, not to mention leftover summer marrows, dried broad beans and a few macadamias that need a hammer to crack.
Living a tree-change lifestyle can lead to an abundance of food, prompting the need to find creative ways to use up produce like blood oranges, mandarins and cauliflowers.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
The weekend was spent looking for recipes to use up the fruit, starting with more blood orange recipes.
Before you suggest, just make marmalade, there is already enough preserves, including marmalade, in the storeroom to survive in The Last House for over 1183 days, without going outside.
I’m also on a bit of a ‘keep away from the supermarket’ crusade at the moment, so any recipe would need to use what is already in the house.
It turned out there was a tub of the much-sought-after cottage cheese in the fridge, approaching its best-before date.
Once upon a time, as recently as last week, finding a recipe to use up what was at hand meant pulling all the go-to cookbooks off the shelf, spreading them over the kitchen bench, and then being disappointed when not finding anything that scratched my cooking itch.
To find a recipe that would use cottage cheese and blood oranges, it was time to use the laptop to scratch that itch.
Using the most popular of cooking websites, finding a recipe that scratched my itch still wasn’t easy, as cottage cheese and blood oranges combined is not really a thing.
Typing in cottage cheese resulted in a lot of cottage pie recipes, not what we were after.
Typing in cottage cheese cake, seven recipes popped up that used cottage cheese, but would require a trip to the supermarket for something, and that would defeat my current crusade.
Then by typing in cottage cheesecake, ‘Mini lemon cottage cheesecake’ popped up in position number one.
The ingredients needed for mini lemon cottage cheesecake were:
cottage cheese ‒ check, in the fridge
yoghurt ‒ check, in the fridge
lemon ‒ substituted to use up one of those bloody blood oranges
three eggs ‒ check
and maple syrup ‒ never, but there is honey
The recipe was simple enough: everything in the food processor, whip until smooth, then bake in muffin tins and out of the oven just in time for afternoon tea.
Once cooled, they came out a little wet, but it was afternoon teatime, and even though they likely needed to chill in the fridge for a while before sampling, they went down a treat.
I did open a jar of blood orange marmalade, just to add a little ‘something, something’, as a garnish, placing a piece of candied orange on each one.
Despite having plenty of preserves like marmalade in stock, the challenge is to create recipes using existing ingredients without relying on supermarket trips.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
I’m not going to share the recipe because it is not mine to share, but you'll likely know where to look if you want to cook your own mini lemon cottage cheesecakes made with blood oranges.
In the next Jaci can cook column, things are returning a little bit to normal, as I’ve got myself organised enough to get in the kitchen, with time to bake a lemon meringue pie.
Enjoy.
- Jaci
Do you have a favourite recipe or a hint for Jaci? Let her know by dropping her a line at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au
