Last night I had the honour of helping Gian Carlo Caldesi with one of his cookery demonstrations at the Caffe Caldesi cookery school. What fun we had! On arrival I was told that I could demonstrate any pudding I wanted and was sent out to Tesco Metro to buy ingredients of my choice! This was 5 minutes before the class was due to start and just my luck Tesco's wasn't very well stocked yesterday evening. The various ideas I had all went out of the window when there was no fruit available. So we experimented and made a chocolate, vanilla and ginger cheesecake which went down well!

This was to serve 20 so you might want to scale it down a bit! Utterly calorific and not one for the faint hearted!

1kilo mascarpone

500grams cream cheese

500ml extra thick double cream

2 vanilla pods

50grams caster sugar

4 packets of chocolate coated ginger biscuit, blitz into crumbs

150 grams butter, melted

100grams plain chocolate, melted

10 Ferrero Roche, cut in half

Begin by making the vanilla syrup - remove the seeds from the vanilla pod and put both the pods and seeds in a small saucepan with the sugar and a small amount of water. Simmer until the mixture becomes very syrup. Remove the vanilla pods and leave to cool (you can speed the cooling process up by putting the bottom of the saucepan in a sink of cold water). Stir the butter through the ginger biscuit crumbs and press firmly into 2 10inch ring tins to form the cheesecake base.

Mix together the marscarpone, cream cheese and thick double cream. Stir through the vanilla syrup. Pour 3/4 of the melted chocolate mixture and stir through gently - you are aiming for a swirled effect so not too much stirring is needed! Spoon this mixture on top of the biscuit base, drizzle over the remaining chocolate with a fork and decorate with the ferrero roche. Chill in the fridge for at least an hour - longer if you have it - we didn't!!!

Sadly the photographic evidence is in London as I left my camera behind but for a quick last minute pudding with no recipe - it looked pretty good!