Oonah’s Cranachan Cheesecake

I made this one up especially for Burn’s Night. I have tried cranachan in the past but never found it quite to my taste. My husband loves cheesecake and I adore toasted hazelnuts and so I brought my culinary skills to bear on the problem. Now I have another problem – I LIKE IT! I can’t think of a reason not to have this, any old time whiskey is in season!

Okay the Recipe!

This requires no cooking as such but you will need a loose bottomed flan dish about 8ins diameter and perhaps a dry frying pan…

Also try to buy some well flavoured raspberries! I was lucky that M&S had some lovely ones this week. Otherwise use tinned or frozen.

For the base:
3½ oz butter
4 oz digestive biscuits
3 oz toasted oatmeal (I toasted porridge oats on the dry pan)
2 oz roasted hazelnut pieces (I used a pestle and mortar but you can do it with a plastic bag and rolling pin and then toast them on the pan or in an oven on high for about 10 minutes. Be careful not burn either the oats or nuts.)

Put the oats and biscuits in processor (or bag) and crush to crumbs. Add the broken up hazelnuts as they are.
Pour on the melted butter and stir well.
Line the base of your flan dish with this mixture.

If you wish you can make a little extra oatmeal and hazelnuts for topping…

For the topping:
5 or 6 oz Low fat creamed cheese such as Philadelphia Light – at room temperature.
300 mls/10 fluid oz extra thick double cream
3½ oz icing sugar sifted
90 mls (that’s three medice glasses) whiskey I used Bushmills Grain Whiskey

Place these in a deep bowl and whisk until really thick.

Spoon this onto the base and smooth the top. Decorate with raspberries and some toasted hazelnuts or flaked chocolate or — use your imagination

For the Raspberry sauce:
3 oz raspberries
30 mls whiskey
1 tbs sugar.

Place in bowl and microwave then pass through a sieve and allow to cool. If it’s cloudy or too thin, boil for one minute and add a tiny bit of butter for gloss. Pour into a small jug and allow to cool.

Leave this cake and the sauce in the fridge for at least two hours. Overnight is good. Serve with the raspberry sauce just drizzles on the plate or on the top or make a pattern with it using a baster or decoration utensils.

Burn’s Night Visual

Anticipating the Cranachan Cheesecake between courses.

Having hailed and flamed and eaten the haggis with neeps and tatties enough and to spare, the cranachan cheesecake took the noble pudding’s place and the look on Alwyn’s face says it all – a bit good!

I was off to fetch a knife and plates. Thr recipe will be forthcoming soon so watch this space. I have to admit though I say so myself it was – a bit good!

Oonah’s Cranachan Cheesecake

Burn’s Night

‘Tis Burn’s Night tonight and my clever joint editor Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, contrived by luck or design, to schedule a Scottish-bred poet on EDP today. We are delighted to welcome to Every Day Poets for the first time (not the last I hope?) talented local poet (local to here that is) Pippa Little. Pippa is not only an excellent poet and a very intelligent woman, she’s nice wif it! The Bard would be pleased. And if you are also local to here then please try to join us at:

First Thursday Reading,

FEB 2ND 1- 2pm

ANNE RYLAND and PIPPA LITTLE
Lecture Theatre 6, KIng George V1 Building, University of Newcastle
Free, All Welcome, Sandwich-friendly!

I have a poem in The Pygmy Giant today too In a Winter Garden which came out of a writing challenge in WriteWords some weeks ago. I hope you like that too.

So it’s Haggis, neeps and tatties tonight and we’re having the company of a friend so we will toast the pudding and the bard in appropriate fashion

“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.”

and for afters, Cranachan Cheesecake. I’ll put the recipe up if it’s a success – I made it up you see! and now I am going to experiment by feeding to my husband and a friend.

I have a story in Flashes in the Dark “That Bell” It is slightly longer on horror than my usual fare but chilling enough for a Burn’s Night read.

And a poem in Bewildering Stories, The Smith’s Gold, written at a writing group I go to and inspired by a postcard of the forge at Beamish Museum.

I’m off to the gym now to try and work off that Burn’s Night feast before I eat it! You see what a sad case I am! Shhhhhhh! Let it be our secret.

The geraniums are all dead but I am very much alive

I suppose it was nice while it lasted but the frosts of last week saw them off and now the winter garden looks quite sad – a few small snowdrops are braving the wind.

January is drawing to a close. I must confess it’s a month I like to see the back of but this year at least I have not neglected my resolutions altogether. I have made a good start at the gym. This is the one I go to

Energie Ladies Fitness

- a state of the art place with friendly, helpful, non-judgemental staff and best of all it’s Ladies Only and I hope there are no plans to change that – ever! It’s nice for women of a certain age, like myself, to be able to exercise without feeling that our wobbly bits are being ogled!

(I borrowed the phote from their FB Page – click the link above.)

I use most of these machines in my workout. I feel better already – a lot more optimistic in general; my heart beat is slowing, my breathing is improving and I’m sleeping better.

As editor of EDP I have been spending too far too long at the computer in recent years. A bit like that blue half ball in the right of the gym – this is all about finding balance.

Poetry may be beautiful but it’s no substitute for exercise!

Another part part of my resulution started today. 4 bags of unwanted clothing are now ready for recycling.

Cycling and recycling – it’s my theme for the month.

No lack of frost today

demerara sugar sand
frosting for the eye
piping for the blood

and a flock of geese to top it all
Our noisy companions on their way to the RSPB Reserve at Druridge Bay.

What’s happening in the garden

How about geraniums and snowdrops?

2012 January geraniums and snowdrops

Maybe some Lobelia? Admittedly only a few pale flowers but they shouldn’t really be there…
or can I impress you with a clematis?

I have never seen the like before – especially not this far North-East.

How to NOT get a poem in EDP

My tongue in cheek guidelines in this month’s editorial should prove most helpful in finding out what we don’t want at Every Day Poets which is much easier to explain than what we DO want – or at least it takes less time. So here for the many many people who just can’t be bothered to read all those tiresome guidelines is the short version or would that be the short tempered version? I’m an editor – not a saint!

Keep Writing, Keep Reading and may all you haiku be little ones.

New Year New Guidelines

January 2012

I had a good New Year with a bottle of Champagne and my dear husband to share it with me. True, Champagne doesn’t sgree with me but it’s only once a year – okay maybe twice!

My first Horror of the year is already up along with a photograph to prove that it’s true Nathan very kindly put the photograph that inspired the story onto the site and you have to admit it looks spooky! There was no light where that ‘orb’ is when I took the photograph but it was snowing at the time, very fine, quick snow – and that’s a clue to the explanation of this particular sighting but I wouldn’t spoil it for the world and so I made up a story instead in the fine old tradition of the New Year Ghost Story and I hope you will enjoy it.

I give you Old Tully Cuthbert

I’m expecting “Fragility! in January’s Static Movement and two poems in Bewildering Stories and after that — we’ll see. I have had a couple of really good nightmares recently… (I shouldn’t have watched Dorian Gray.)

Drop by over the next weeks for updates.

Today I had to rearrange my 1st trip to the gym because of these pesky winds which are blattering everything to bits. It should be good drying weather but your smalls might end up in orbit. Having no desire to terrify passing aliens, I have the tumble drier in action instead and hopfully over the next few weeks, it is I who will be getting smaller. In the meantime do go and read and comment on my story and see that spooky pic and Happy New Year to you all.

New Year Stuff

Of course everybody does this but maybe it’s not such a bad idea to review the year a little bit – not too much in my case because I get maudlin – friends gone – my little cat too… BooHooHoo – You get the general idea.

On the other hand; old friendships renewed and I made some new friends in 2011.

I suppose my main breakthroughs this year were the publication of Every Day Poets Anthology ONE and my reprise of reading poetry for an audience – plus at a SLAM no less (I didn’t even know what a slam was this time last year…) and several local venues and on You Tube. I had Poem of the Month in Diamond Twig in April. I got my work into 3 Quarterly Reviews at BwS again, I helped judge Microhorror again and I won my second Binnacle Shorts Prize for prose poem “Death of the Father.”

There is much to look forward to in 2012. Every Day Poets Anthology TWO is in process. I hope to meet my co-editor in person before the year is out as well as other colleagues and friends from my cyberlife – my Parallel Oonahverse. I have joined a gym and I will lose this weight and hope to be fitter on Dec 31st 2012 than I can claim to be at present.

Thank you to all my friends everywhere for your support despite the fact that you know me.

Keep writing, reading, smiling and
STAY SCARY!

December 2011 Reading

My Measuring Stick - some things shadow our lives. It’s only when we confront them that we can recognise that perhaps we give the past more importance than it deserves. To see the photo that inspired this story go here.

In Apollo’s Lyre for the first time this month and so is my friend John Ritchie so check out both stories

http://apollos-lyre.tripod.com/id345.html

http://apollos-lyre.tripod.com/id348.html

A new poem – I’m not really a spoil-sport. I wrote it for a challenge in www.writewords.org.uk and it had to be about aspects of Christmas we didn’t like! I remembered the old film Meet Me In Saint Louis – movie magic – so thanks, Judy Garland.
Have Yourself a Tawdry Little Christmas

© Oonah V Joslin 2011

Disappointment
when the bright, shiny wrappers
fall to the floor
like a bride underneath all that dress
same old skin

the turkey de-fleshed, devoid of stuffing
dirty dinner plates
same old bone

the cracker pulled
same old jokes
paper hat that never fits
tinsel and glitz
tat that looks so drab on boxing day
TV ads for next year’s holiday

the next big fix
the next the next the next
crunch
crisis before the champagne pops
and flattens.

Give us some credit.
We’re not completely dim.
The stars are far away
in Heaven and Hollywood.

This tawdry little show will win
no Oscars and year on year I see
a little more magic
disappear.

Now update yourseld with the rest of my Christmas reads:

At The Linnet’s Wings, which is a superb mag based in the auld country, I have a little story that might bring back memories of Christmas past and I don’t think mine were the only parents who found this solution to the problems of Christmas Eve. Can you finish the logo? – I’d Love a…

Crumpled Note is up today at Postcardshorts and I notice that there a couple by my friend Sandra Crooks too so do go and have a read st that site – each story is post card length but they are little gems (if I say so myself).

Elf Day Santa embraced capitalism along with the whole commercial ethos in the C20th – to the detriment of his “elf” it seems Nathan tells me this is my 72nd Microhorror and one of his favourites thus far. My husband laughed – hopes I haver ordered pork for Christmas Day.

A Final Seal – poem at Bewildering Stories

Next up, a little unexpectedly, this very short short in Postcardshorts Public Transport You know the scenario – it a familiar one. So glad to be in this little gem of a writing site for the first time.

Department Store  Friends who have been out with me know that I hate shops unless they are on the High Street – and I loath Department Stores and Shopping Malls because I have no sense of direction. I get lost and panic. Once, having passed the same rail of dresses in Fenwicks in Newcastle for the 4th time, I asked a total stranger how to get out of there… I was within sight of the exit but it led into an arcade and so I couldn’t see the difference. “Just past those hats” – she said. Another time I was on the wrong floor but I couldn’t find the escalator. I’m the kind of person whom store detectives watch and assistants ask if I need any help – I always look a bit lost I suppose or up to something – looking around me to try to ascertain where I am. And have you ever walked into one of those damned mirrors they use to confuse the hell out of you? Well maybe it just seems that way… I have. Bump – sorry madam – oh! it’s me! Nuff said.

In this week too are my Writewords friends, Sandra Crooks and David Harper – well done you two! What a romantic pair you are .

Don’t forget to read these too
http://www.everydayfiction.com/biting-the-hand-that-feeds-you-by-sandra-crook/

http://www.everydaypoets.com/believers-ground-by-james-graham