Beach Party Fare

Beach Party Fare
Originally uploaded by Cakelaw

We've been suffering from the winter blues at work, so to lift everyone's spirits, our team held an office beach party on Friday afternoon. We wore sunglasses and hats, played ball, sat on blow-up fluoro chairs and filled up the esky with beer, wine, orange juice and Malibu. The food included lots of chopped fresh pineapple and other fruits as well as the usual office party chips. My contribution to the party fare was mini passionfruit cheesecakes and sea and sand patty cakes (pictured).

I made the passionfruit cheesecakes by blending together a tin of condensed milk, a 250g block of cream cheese, the juice of one lemon, two 10g sachets of gelatine dissolved in water and an 80g tin of passionfruit pulp, then pouring the mixture into tart shells made in accordance with the same recipe that I used for the mini lemon meringue pies and refrigerating until set. I used both light condensed milk and light cream cheese - it makes no difference to the finished product, in my view. I made 24 mini cheesecakes, with some cheesecake filling left over (which I just poured onto a biscuit base in an 8" cheesecake pan for myself to eat at leisure).

The patty cakes were made from the recipe in The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. I iced the patty cakes with bright yellow (sand) and blue (sea) coloured glace icing, and topped each with an Allens Naturals Tropical Fish lolly.

Thanks to Racquel and Sam for brainstorming and organising our beach party - it brightened up a grey Friday afternoon.