We are so pleased to welcome back our chef in the west, four-year-old Nora Ralph! She delighted us all with her buttermilk fried chicken and we are similarly enchanted with this recipe - gorseflower cheesecake.

Nora forages for gorse flowers with her dad Barry, who is a chef and owns the House of Plates restaurant in Castlebar. You can follow her food journey on Instagram - @nora_on_food.

Her last post received lots of media attention stretching as far as the United States and has nearly 300,000 views. Way to go, Nora!

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If you have a budding chef like Nora in your house and you would like to share what they're cooking while they're home, we'd love to hear about it. Send your videos to ICL@farmersjournal.ie or Whatsapp to 089-249 9922.

Nora's gorseflower cheesecake

Ingredients

250g digestive biscuits

30g melted butter

150g gorseflower petals

1 sachet lemon jelly

60g sugar

200g cream cheese

250ml cream

A drop of yellow food colouring

Topping:

50g chopped almond

50g desicated coconut

Gorse petals

Honey

Honeycomb

Chocolates

Directions

  • 1 Crush the biscuits and mix with the melted butter. Press the mixture into a spring-form cake pan and chill to firm it up.
  • 2 Make the gorse syrup: in a pot, combine the gorseflower, sugar, lemon jelly and 60ml water. Bring to a boil and leave to sit for a while for all the flavours to fuse. When ready, strain the mixture so the petals don't go into the cake.
  • 3 Make the cheesecake: in a stand mixer, add the cream, cream cheese, yellow food colouring and cooled gorse petal syrup mixture. Mix well with the whisk attachment until everything is light, fluffy and well combined.
  • 4 Pour the mixture on top of the chilled crumb base. Place in the fridge to set for at least four hours.
  • 5 When ready to serve, garnish with toasted coconut and almonds, honeycomb, a drizzle of honey and gorseflower petals.