Frozen Cream Cheese Frosting Sandwich

So you made some pumpkin cupcakes or carrot cake last night, and topped it with cream cheese frosting, which everybody knows is the best thing ever.

And then...

...plot twist: There's leftover cream cheese frosting.

But wait! Before you stick your finger into the bowl or hold the piping nozzle over your mouth, run out to the shops (or open your cupboard if you're lucky enough) and grab a packet of digestive/tea biscuits – that's all you need for these frozen cream cheese frosting sandwiches.

Frozen Cream Cheese Frosting Sandwiches

makes ~15 sandwiches

3 tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 oz cream cheese, at room temperature

¾ cups icing sugar

¼ tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp cinnamon (optional)

~30 digestive/tea biscuits

OR

how ever much cream cheese frosting you have left

how ever much digestive/tea biscuits is available to you

Instructions (really?)

To make the frosting:

1. In an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, (I used whisk attachments and it was fine) beat the butter and cream cheese on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2-3 minutes.

2. Reduce the speed and gradually add icing sugar, beating until just incorporated.

3. Add vanilla and cinnamon until well combined.

4. Increase speed to medium high and beat until frosting is light and fluffy, about 1-2 minutes.

Assembly:

1.Pipe or spread cream cheese frosting generously on the flat side of one biscuit, leaving a little bit of space on the edges for the frosting to ooze out with pressure, and cover with the flat side of another.

2. Freeze for at least an hour.

The end product will be a sweet, delicious and moreish dessert snack which is super easy to make. The frosting hardens into an ice cream-like texture which holds itself well between the biscuits. Really, there's no excuse not to make these.

Mikado White Chocolate

Mmm, chocolate-coated biscuit sticks. Pocky used to be my snack-of-happiness, (I just made that up... don't question me, I don't know either) and a box of strawberry-flavoured Pocky was unbeatable among all the other snacks sold in my old school's bookshop.

Mikado is actually the exact same thing, it's simply been renamed throughout Europe. I never get why they do this, it makes immigrants like me panic for a month or two, yelling, "They don't have Pocky here! They've got these other brands but no Pocky! It's not the sameee!!!" to anyone who would listen.

Since Strawberry and Chocolate were the only available flavours sold in the bookshop, (I didn't really do grocery shopping) so this was actually my first time trying the White Chocolate coating. (was on offer for £1 at WH Smith)

It's now my favourite flavour! The biscuit stick has that perfect snappability ('moreish' isn't a real word too. Deal with it.) that I know and love, and the smooth white chocolate coating is just delicious.

 A little bit of silliness – Mikado/Pocky is probably the closest I'll ever come to having a cigarette in my mouth!

Graze #3

Click here for box #2.

As you can see, the sun is shining and spring is here! England had better not mess with me again and start snowing in the middle of June, or something.

So a new graze box arrived. And this was ages ago, I held out this post for a long time.

I took one look at this "Crunchini Basilico" punnet and thought: How annoying would it be if the oil spilled out onto my bed and clothes?

Guess what happened right after that.

I think the stain is still there on my shirt.

The crunchinis are, well, crunchy, and biscuit-like, with herby ingredients. The basil-infused oil was fragrant, and compliments the crunchini well.

There weren't a lot of these biscuits, though. But it is an alright savoury snack. Rated "Like".

I expected "Summer Pudding"to be really good, since it's just a representation of flavours and not the actual pudding.

 Fortunately, Graze has done well for this one. To get the full effect of the summer pudding flavour, I used a spoon to scoop up all the bits, getting the myriad of tastes in one mouthful.

You get sweet, yoghurt-coated sunflower seeds, flavourful sponge biscuit buttons, black currants and cranberries. Altogether, they are sweet, tangy and refreshing. Rated "Love".

Graze has done all they possibly can to this brownie to make it marginally healthier than a regular brownie. As a result, the brownie has the texture of a light cake, is less sweet, but still tasty with the generous amounts of chopped hazelnuts.

Fine, the three of you are 129 calories in total, but I could eat a basket of strawberries for that amount of calories, and still get my sweet craving satisfied. If I'm going to have a brownie, I'd much rather go all-out and get a large slab of dense, barely-baked, fudgy brownie. Rated "Like".

An interesting attempt by Graze. These are crispy noodle bits, peanuts and beans seasoned with something rather salty, and chilli powder.

Good flavours but requested not to send again, because it makes me thirsty – a little too much salt and seasoning to eat all in one go.

Weetabix Apple Breakfast Biscuits

I'm becoming quite trusting of the apple and cinnamon combination. Almost always, the flavour turns out right, often pulling off a killer combo in crumble, ice cream and cake.

The first type of 'breakfast biscuits' I ever had were Belvita's honey and oat biscuits, which I absolutely love.

Weetabix has a similar type of biscuit, which I bought at a corner shop for 39p. Each pack has a plastic container of 4 biscuits. The container is quite annoying to meddle with to remove a biscuit, as there is no space for a finger to slot in.

The biscuits have a lovely, hearty taste, which warms up in your mouth. There is a great balance of apple and cinnamon flavours, but they are mild yet noticeable, which gives way to the wheat-y base. The biscuits are dense and crunchy, and they melt in your mouth.

The thing about breakfast biscuits is that they are rarely eaten during breakfast. At least in the case of my friends and I, anyway. We bring them to school and have them for a snack. Eighty percent of the time, I plan to do that, but end up finishing them while sitting on my desk at home. (They are really addictive and moreish!)

Biscuits are biscuits, and they'll be treated like biscuits, even if they're meant for a certain time of the day.

Fox's Viennese Melts

I brought these back to Singapore in my suitcase for a visit during the winter of 2012 along with all the other packaged British treats, because they were more than worthy to cross oceans the Asian continent for 13 hours for my friends and family to try.

Don't know why this picture looks as if it has been dipped in a bloodbath.

Luxurious is the word to describe it. Fox's Raspberry & Cream Viennese Melts (£1.59) are decadent.

The buttery biscuits crumble so softly and wonderfully as you bite into them, and lead you politely (my imagery is on crack today) to the filling within, which is made of raspberry jam and vanilla-flavoured cream. Red berries and cream are a popular British combination which works very well together, like maple and pecan nuts, or cookies and cream, or chocolate and hazelnuts, or Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling.

I might even go out to get a another packet after this.

Cadbury Crunchie Bar and Biscuits

I only discovered about a week ago that, in the world of confectionary, honeycomb isn't actual, hanging-from-a-tree-bees-live-in-it honeycomb. Yes, I have eaten real raw honeycomb before, but no, it didn't occur to me that the crunchy, golden, yellow, aerated stuff in chocolate bars and stuff were not dried-up honeycombs, but heated, risen and hardened sugar syrup.

Revelation aside, here is a review of Cadbury's Crunchie bar (65p), which is a block of honeycomb coated with milk chocolate.

If this sounds like diabetes to you, I assure you that it probably is. It is a sweet, decadent treat, and the crunchy honeycomb melts warmly in your mouth, with a great burnt sugar taste. However, a few bites into it and I started getting an uncomfortable, sharp feeling in my throat, from the sugar overload. It may have 185 calories (just think – half the bar is made up of air bubbles), alright for a chocolate bar, but every ounce of it is sugar, which is too much for one to handle.

On the other hand, the biscuit version of the Crunchie bar has become one of my favourite things ever.

There are 8 thick and round , chocolate-coated biscuits in a pack, which I grabbed at a good Tesco offer of £1. (U.P £1.79)

These biscuits are really ones to try. The chocolate coats a layer of biscuit and a layer of honeycomb, so you get varying textures – smooth milk chocolate, crunchy biscuit, and crispy honeycomb. The flavour in it is also really good. The honeycomb gives the biscuit a lovely taste instead of being overpowering, like in the bar, while the biscuit prevents chocolate and honeycomb combination from clogging your throat.

I often fill half my suitcase with cookies when I return to Singapore for visits during term break – these biscuits are definitely going in there.

IKEA

I had never realized how much strategic planning goes into the layout of every IKEA megastore. When I was younger, my route simply headed straight up the escalators and into the ballpit-playground for about two hours, making friends and enemies within the mass of multi-coloured spheres, before coming out into reality and heading home in a car full of large cardboard boxes and plastic things.

The food bit didn't seem relevant to me until I sat down in the IKEA Resturant one day with my mum and had some poached salmon slathered with what I know now as hollandaise sauce, and it absolutely blew my mind and made me fall in love with salmon fillets. My mum also started to buy a seemingly never-ending supply of Swedish meatballs, as well as lingönberry jam and that creamy, brown, magical gravy. She'd pop them in the oven and I'd have about fifteen of them for dinner, with fries and hot gravy. Mmm.

About two weeks ago, my friend, Esther, and I, shared a few plates of food picked out from the various 'stations' in Wembley's IKEA restaurant which vaguely resembles an Oliver Twist-esque food queue, with the generic grey trays and all. However, the place had a lovely, large and homely interior with golden wood, and simple but chic lighting.

Esther is a queen.

Ten meatballs were £3.89, and they came with gravy, a free flow of jam, as well as mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Some other customers had fries with their meatballs, but I'm guessing that they came with the larger quantities. The meatballs were bouncy and tasty -- flawless, and never failing to impress.

The salad bar had a small variety of beans, leafy greens, beetroot, giant couscous,coleslaw and cucumber. For a the size of a soup bowl, it was somewhere between £2-3. (There was a fixed price but I can't remember it now.)

The salmon and spinach lasagne was a generous portion, and tasted so good. Warm, browned lasagne layers encompassing fluffy salmon bits and fragrant spinach -- it was quite filling as well!

There is also a free flow of coffee, which one has to pay (If I remember correctly, it was about 95p per cup or something like that) for per possession of mug, unless you have IKEA FAMILY membership -- then you get free coffee on weekdays!



And of course, who can resist their desserts?

No, salad leaf, you are healthy, get out of the picture.



Filled with whipped cream and held by a yummy shortcrust pastry, this strawberry tart was simply heaven.

Their quality-control is really good as well. Every tart looks the same, and just by looking, you can tell that each one tastes absolutely yummy. I guess it is due to the fact that we are talking about IKEA, and they probably handle their food like their generic, please-all furniture.

The almond cake with chocolate and butterscotch pieces (£1.75) was too good-looking to resist. The layered, nutty sponge cake has a lovely caramel-like flavour, and when topped with butterscotch, whipped cream and chocolate, there is a rich blissfulness which is not overpowering due to the presence of the almond sponge layers. 

There is a lot of apple in this Swedish Apple Cake (£1.45), which is great. At a glance, one would think that the apple in encased in shortcrust pastry, similar to the likes of an apple pie, but upon closer inspection, the 'pastry' is actually a firm cake, which I guess is what makes it Swedish. Customers are promised vanilla sauce, but I guess they ran out, because we got a blob of whipped cream instead. I would have preferred the cake warm, rather than cold from being stored on the chilled shelves. It's alright, but I'm not a huge fan of this one.

The Chocolate Truffle Cake (95p) was what you'd expect from a truffle – rich, dense, and chocolatey. It might be a bit too rich for an entire bar, but it was alright when served with whipped cream and shared with a friend.

This pretty much sums up our IKEA trip.

After the long and tedious journey through the land of beds, tables, plates, potted plants, toys, and the final showdown of the ceiling-high shelves of brown boxes, we made it to the cashier, which felt as good as reaching the finish-line of a marathon track. All I checked out was a bottle of Dryck Bubbel Apple & Lingön, which is a sparkling drink made of apple juice and Lingönberries. (£1.89) It is a sweet and satisfying drink, and both flavours compliment each other well –neither overpowers the other.

My bottle is green, though.

Like a drink stall for the said marathon track, there is a bistro just beyond the cashiers which sells hot dogs for 60p along with soft drinks, soft-serve ice cream cones, cinnamon buns and doughnuts. Perfect for the exhausted shopper. Sneaky.

Next to the bistro is the Swedish Food Market, which sells Swedish food (no shit, Sherlock.), some featured in the IKEA restaurant earlier on, such as the apple cake and the almond-layered cake thing. Of course, there are frozen meatballs, packets of gravy mix, jars of lingönberry jam, and packets of vanilla sauce mix for the cakes. Other popular Swedish items such as herring roe, cod roe, salmon, and oat biscuits (I sampled some of these – really really nice.) were aplenty on the shelves.

Like Choccie Dodgers, Kakor Choklad (50p!) is a sandwich biscuit filled with chocolate ganache, with a portion of it peeking out through a heart-shaped hole in the top biscuit, which is a plain butter biscuit, while the bottom one is a chocolate biscuit.

Wow. The chocolate filling really is something. It is thick, creamy, and has a fragrant chocolate taste, without the sweet, milky, artificial THIS-IS-CHOCOLATE-DO-YOU-HEAR-ME flavouring you sometimes get in other cookies. 

See that map on my screen? I'm planning world domination at the moment.

Also sold at a great price of 50p, Kex Äpple looked interesting to me. I bought it thinking that it would contain an apple-flavoured filling, but the biscuit sandwich was filled with vanilla-flavoured filling, while an apple-flavoured candy occupies the heart-shaped hole. What?

Okay, the filling was good and the biscuits had a good, firm texture without being too crumbly.

The candy did have a lovely apple taste, but that little centre is the only instance during which you have any apple taste at all – the rest of the biscuit is a normal vanilla sandwich cookie. The apple taste didn't even spread. Furthermore, that candy was hard. Not hard like rock-hard, but more gooey-hard, like a licorice stick. Determined to prolong the lifespan of the apple flavour to last throughout the entire biscuit, I bit into half of the candy bit and had to wait a good 4 seconds wiggling the biscuit about, trying to rip apart that damned heart. IKEA could have been much smarter with this biscuit.

I can't wait to go back to IKEA to try the rest of their budget-priced foods!

IKEA - Wembley

2 Drury Way

North Circular Road

London

NW10 0TH

0845 355 1141

Opening hours:

Monday to Friday	10:00 am – 10:00 pm
Saturday	9:00 am – 10:00 pm
Sunday	11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Graze #2

Click here for part one.

I found my second Graze box waiting for me when I got home on Friday evening. I don't remember why, but I remember feeling a little bit down that day.

I opened the box and could not help feeling better when I see four little punnets with cute illustrated fonts and doodles on them, each containing a yummy-looking snack.

Apple & Cinnamon flapjacks - A big YES to this one. I love the hint of cinnamon, and can feel little apple pieces, which don't overpower the almighty golden syrup taste. I've labelled this snack as "Love", which means that Graze will send me these flapjacks more often.

Informative page in my booklet

Cookies & Cream - Creative, but a little bit strange. This snack contains mini chocolate cookies, white chocolate buttons, (there were only four) raw hazelnuts and sunflower seeds. The sunflower seeds created a dull background flavour which had nothing to do with the cookies & cream concept, but I enjoyed the white chocolate. The cookies were alright, and although the hazelnuts were probably meant to compliment the chocolate flavours, the fact that they were raw and just there in the box didn't do much for the overall combination. Still a good snack, but just doesn't fit its title that well.

Boston Baguettes w/ BBQ Relish - The 'Baguettes' were crunchy breadsticks with salt and tomato seasoning, and the dip was a good-quality BBQ sauce with tomato chunks. It was delicious, and a good snack to have with just 84 calories to make you feel better about having it fifteen minutes before dinnertime because they were just sitting there on your table for no particular reason.

Toffee Apple - Thank goodness, this one survived the weekend and made it to school on Monday.   I felt that the apples had a strange texture – a dried exterior with rubbery, semi-moist insides. The taste of the apples dipped into the toffee isn't too bad, though, a pretty good snack.

Come on guys. Just order a free Graze box using that code, and I get £1 off my next box! These boxes are really lovely, the snacks are just so satisfying.