Yesterday I made a cheesecake for Clare. A vegan cheesecake, all worthy Violife, fuelled coconut cream with some McVitie’s filth for its super sweet foundations. And somehow as I leaned into that very specific spoon-to-melted butter biscuits action as you press down the crumb in your spring tin of soon-to-be dessert of joy (fingers crossed Clare!) I found myself back in my childhood cheesecake-making days. Not the posh ones, not the ones I learned to I bake all New York like when I first moved to Brighton in 1990 and blagged myself a job in the kitchen of Sprouts restaurant in Hove with Bix and Kevin.

Nothing that civilised. I was instantly back in the kitchen at Pole Barn Lane in Frinton (Not quite the rustic glam setting it sounds – there was no barn or exotic pole dancing).  Back in my mother’s kitchen watching her make a Greens Cheesecake Mix. A packet of weekend heaven, a Sunday treat we only enjoyed on the rarest of occasions, the box filled with a sachet of battered biscuits and one of Greens “cheesecake” mix, the like of which was anything but cheesecake. Believe me, I checked – the minuscule 2.5% cheese content barely able to see off the E472b, E450, E341 and Beta Carotene. But boy did those numbers taste good.  Whipped like a dream topping (yes that too!). Sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and if one of mum’s new boyfriends was staying over, some crystalised fruit shape segments of indistinguishable flavours, it was a good day pud. A forget about school pud. A living a dream pud. The best pud. The memory was brought back by the very particular sensation of pushing a buttery biscuit base into my favourite loose-bottomed tin.

Yeah, some kids of the 70s have European adventures, ski trips, or flights to Disneyland to remember. Me? I have Greens Cheesecake Mix. Something this skint Essex kid is proud of it.  Plus reliving it is only going to cost me £1.85 in Sainsburys. Result. See you at the front. I’ll be the one with the hundreds and thousands.  

Greens Cheesecake Mix – still somehow available in all good stockists.