How to Cheat with Cream

It isn't always easy to get hold of good English cream. Canadian food inspectors keep a permanent finger on the trigger ready to shut down imports of dairy products from the UK.

The problem has been frequent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in the UK. At one point even a product called "Cadbury Dairy Milk" was affected.

So what can you do when you want to make a Victoria Sponge, strawberries and cream, or chocolate eclairs? Well, you can cheat of course. You can make something quite similar to real Devonshire Cream with a little bit of cunning. I did and this is how I did it:

Ingredients

• 250g cream cheese
• 1/2 cup of table cream
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 dash of lemon juice

Preparation

• Using a wooden spoon, mix the cream cheese and sugar together. This step helps to soften the cream cheese.
• Add the table cream and lemon juice then whisk for a couple of minutes until the mixture stiffens
• Bob's your uncle

John's Notes
You now have a small bowl of delicious white stuff that tastes incredibly like Devonshire cream. So what can you do with it? I put a big dollop of the stuff on top of banana milk jelly (blend 4 over-ripe bananas with some sugar and 2 cups of milk. Add a prepared sachet of gelatin and allow to set).

I also made a Victoria sponge (for convenience I used Greens Sponge Mix). A Victoria sponge cake is a sandwich of two sponges with jam and cream in the middle. I still have a lot of cheat cream left. Watch out for new creamy ideas coming soon to this blog!

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