I was thinking about joining The Great Irish Bake since I’ve read about it on Adrienne’s blog two years ago. The Great Irish Bake is a biannual event organized by Temple Street Hospital Charity to raise money for the children’s hospital in Dublin.
You know I love baking, but I’m terrified of organizing events, I never know where to start and it always looks so, so scary at the beginning. But I’m lucky that sometimes people around me just do something I should do ages ago. So one of my coworkers just said let’s bake with Great Irish Bake and everybody said “Brilliant idea!”, couldn’t be simpler.
I usually just bake for us, sometimes for close friends and my coworkers, but rarely ever for strangers, so the pressure was on. I baked on Thursday until midnight. and that was only because I prepped whatever I could a day before. I was grateful for no major disasters the only two were minor – burnt caramel and split chocolate (having more ingredients to make a second batch is always a good thing), it could go so much worse.
On the next morning our office kitchen was stuffed with cakes. It was amazing view, choux buns, cookies, marble cakes, rocky road, apple pie, chocolate cakes, brownies, cupcakes and more. All the girls made incredible job and it felt really good to be a part of it.
For our bake sale I contributed 10 minute chocolate chip cookies, freckled cake, berry marshmallow slice (that I will tell you about in the next post, it was a hit) and this caramel cheesecake. I wouldn’t recommend cheesecake for any cake sale as it should be chilled all the time (next time I will know), but it tastes amazing.
Caramel cheesecake
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- 180g digestive cookies (I used chocolate ones)
- 60g butter, melted
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- 85g butter, room temperature
- 175g sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla paste
- 665g (430g + 235g) dulce de leche or Carnation Caramel
- 1 kg full-fat curd cheese (twarog also knows as quark), ground at least twice
- 5 eggs, room temperature
- 1 1/2 Tbsp plain flour
- 3 Tbsp milk
- 3 tsp unsalted butter