6 Minute Ice-Pops and Emergency Cheesecake

The weekend has been and gone. To recap on some of the events...

Friday night I took my Mum to see Jacobs abs Eclipse at the cinema. Not sure it was really a great film, but the fact that Jacob wore a t-shirt like once gave me enough of a distraction from the plot....if only he were 10 years older (I'm a cougar right?!)

Saturday it seemed like we spent all day walking around. We went on the search of a running shop to get Mr H some new running trainers, then down to Southampton for a wonder around. We also took the dogs on two long walks (once around the park and once around the woods to watch the sunset). Sunday we did our 10k route into Winchester for a mooch around and then did housework and walked the dogs some more.

I think the highlights of the weekend were the Ice-pops, my emergancy cheesecake and knocking more time off our 10k route (and that was with 3 minutes walking at various points due to stitches & cramps!).

Onto the Ice-Pops. As we were wondering around John Lewis, I saw this cool looking box, on closer inspection I was baffled. How on earth did this thing work? It had to be worth a shot!
When we got it home it turned out that it needed to be frozen for 24 hours first & perhaps most interesting that the pops need to have sugar in them to set properly (so no diet coke pops for example).

On Sunday we nipped out and got some fruit juices and then I experimented. We got Pineapple Juice, Orange Juice and Apple & Raspberry Juice. This is the unit set up with the lolly sticks in place ready. There are lots of different techniques to end up with different types of lollies. I went for a 3 flavour one.

I filled 3/4 of the mould with Orange juice and waited for the outside to freeze. Then using a straw I sucked out the unfrozen juice and filled with the Apple & Raspberry juice. Once that had frozen I topped it up with Pineapple Juice. The whole process took less than 10 minutes!!

This is the final result! How cute is that. I'm loving the quick Ice-Pop. You can see the layers of juices in the first pic, then the different flavoured inside in the second, and finally the funky sticks in the last picture.


They were super tasty and super quick. Just perfect for that emergency sweet fix. Apparently you can make them and then freeze then seperately in freezer bags too if you did want to make a batch up, but I like the idea of being able to make whatever flavour I want on a whim. I'm looking forward to trying out lots of different combinations and think I'm going to start a seperate blog dedicated to recipes.

This leads me onto my Emergency Cheesecake. It was early Sunday evening, I was flagging after the run in the morning and I needed sugar and it needed to be in the form of cheesecake.

Ingredients
1 tbsp Philidelphia Light
1/2 tbsp Double Cream
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/2 tbsp Caster Sugar
4 Squares Dark Chocolate - melted (I used Montezumas 70%)
Handful of Raspberries
2 biscuits - crushed (I used 2 rich tea biscuits as that was all I had)

Method
Mix the philly, cream, sugar, vanilla until combined. Crush in the two biscuits and add the raspberries and mix up so they split a little. Finally add in the chocolate and fold in so the mixture marbles.

Stick in a bowl and freeze for a few minutes (you can lick the bowl in the meantime). Remove from the freezer and enjoy.

I've got a spare in the fridge, so I might give you a pic tomorrow (if I remember to photograph it before eating it that is)