Laura: Today’s blog post is inspired, as it so often is, by food. I visited the Kitty Café in Nottingham on Sunday with my dad when he came up to see me (seriously, the Kitty Café is as good as it sounds- a place with food and cats mixed into one. What more could you want?) and treated myself to one of their gorgeous cakes.

I’ve been to the Kitty Café before a few times, and once with Em also, who tried out the most amazing looking strawberry shortbread cheesecake. It looked so good that I vowed to try it next time, which I did do on my visit with my dad.

It. Was. Heaven.

In fact, it tasted so good that I knew immediately I had to find an easier, alternative way to make it to share with you guys on our blog. So here it is- the simple way to make strawberry shortbread cheesecake!

The ingredients you’ll need for this one are 100g butter, 250g digestive biscuits, 600g soft cheese, 100g icing sugar, 250ml pot double cream, strawberry sauce and vanilla essence- you’ll probably find the majority of these items stashed at the back of your cupboard from previous baking sessions, apart from the refrigerated items, of course.

To begin, line a round loose-bottomed tin with baking paper and butter it for good measure.

Next comes the fun part! Empty your digestive biscuits into a bag and bash them around until they’re broken into tiny crumbs. You can do this however you like- you could sit on the bag, play tennis with it, bash your sister with it… or you could just crush the biscuits with a rolling pin.

Melt the butter in a pan on the stove, then transfer the digestive biscuits into a mixing bowl and add the butter, mixing together. Tip them into the prepared tin and flatten them against the base. That’s your base done!

For the filling, mix the icing sugar, soft cheese, cream and a couple of drops of vanilla essence together until the mixture is completely combined. Pour the filling on top of the base and spread evenly over the surface. Refrigerate for a couple of hours.

For the topping, it’s time to get creative with your strawberry sauce. Squeeze it onto your cheesecake in whatever pattern you fancy. For the shortbread pieces, I used digestive biscuits as an alternative (helloo, poor student here- have you seen the price of shortbread? I think I’ll stick to Aldi’s digestives), but if you can afford shortbread, feel free to use it! Break it up into pieces and scatter over the sauce.

All that’s left now is to refrigerate your cheesecake overnight, then it’s ready to eat! I tried and tested this recipe myself and even though there were more ingredients than I would have liked to have paid for, it still worked out as cheaper than my £2.85 slice of cheesecake from the Kitty Café because I had a lot of the ingredients already, and this time I got an entire cheesecake out of it!

Stay tuned for more posts coming soon,

Laura x

Laura: Well, here it is... the long awaited first food post! Just to make everyone clear- me and Em aren't chefs. As students, we don't have the time or money to be buying ingredients for complicated recipes and spending hours perfecting them, as much as we'd like to. About as adventurous I get right now, food-wise, is making mine and Em's specialty: Cajun chicken pasta (which we will post the recipe for in the future), but even that isn't wow-she-can-really-cook amazing. 

So our food posts will be less of a how to make this complicated recipe tutorial, and more of a little window into the delicious, mouth-watering foods me and Em eat on a daily basis. Most of the dishes we'll post are really easy to make, but if not, we'll always offer an alternative way to make them without blowing the budget. So prepare to feel hungry! 

For this post, I thought  I'd share with you one of my favourite breakfast/dessert foods that honestly tastes like heaven on a plate- these blueberry and whipped cream pancakes that I sampled at The Pudding Pantry in Nottingham.

I feel so lucky to live in a city and be surrounded by so many tempting food outlets, and the Pudding Pantry has quickly become one of my favourites. It offers a whole range of pancakes, from maple syrup and bacon to caramel and ice cream, but I chose blueberry and whipped cream and wasn't disappointed. 

I dipped my pancakes in the blueberry compote and whipped cream, which was the perfect mix of flavours- the zingy, slightly sour blueberry compote bought out the sweetness of the cream and stopped the dish from being too sickly. 

Ever since visiting the Pudding Pantry, I've been longing to go back and eat my meal all over again, but at just over £5 per dish, I've instead come up with a less expensive alternative. The ingredients you need for one person are shop bought pancakes, a tub of fresh double cream, a handful of blueberries, and sugar.

Once you have your ingredients, all you need to do is empty the tub of cream into a mixing bowl and whisk with an electric whisk for less than a minute- the cream should thicken immediately. 

Then, for the blueberry compote (the most difficult part), empty the blueberries into a saucepan with 1 tablespoon of water and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Cook on a low heat for 10 minutes. Add a dash more water if your compote isn't liquid enough, and an extra pinch of sugar if you have a sweet tooth.

Once your dips are finished, toast the pancakes for a couple of minutes in the toaster until crispy and browned around the edges. 

And that's it, you're all done! Presentation is entirely up to you- you can pour the blueberry compote all over the pancakes and follow up with a good helping of the whipped cream, or you could take the more organized approach and put each dip into a little serving pot. However you do it, this recipe does not disappoint and almost tastes as good as the real thing.

Laura x