CHEESY COTTAGE CRAFTED FROM CRACKERS

Fancy an alternative to a cheeseboard? Why not craft a chalet out of cheese and bread? This one comes with ham roses, cucumber trees and a mozzarella snowman.

INGREDIENTS: 2 large loaves of bread; 100g butter; 3 large tubs (500g each) of cream cheese or goat’s cheese; 800g assorted hard cheese (red Leicester, cheddar, smoked cheese, etc); small packet of lattice-shaped crackers; 1 block of parmesan and several packets of charcuterie; nuts and smaller crackers for decoration.

BUILDING TOOLS: Slotted pasta spoon for hollowing out the bread, a bread knife, a small serrated knife, a butter knife, a large palette knife for covering the chalet in cream cheese, cocktail sticks, tweezers, scissors and a wooden board to assemble it all on.

FOUNDATIONS AND WALLS: There’s much less construction involved in this chalet; all I have to do is slice the top quarter off a loaf and hollow it out. I use a slotted pasta spoon for this; it catches the soft bread easily without weakening the structure. Next, I use the serrated knife to cut holes for the windows and doors. To make the roof, I take the second loaf of bread and slice down diagonally on each side from a midpoint on the top, creating a roof-like triangular shape.

Both loaves then go in a low oven (120c) for around an hour to completely dry out. Once the bread is cool, I use butter to stick the two halves together and cover the outside in a thin layer of butter, before putting it in the fridge for an hour to chill. This will give it a tacky coating for the tiles to stick to.

ROOF TILES: I take the buttered chalet out of the fridge and cover the whole structure in a thick layer of cream cheese. Then I cut the hard cheese into small diamond

shapes and stick them in rows, in alternating colours, along the roof, starting from the bottom so they overlap. I use a row of green olives to add colour to the top of the roof, and line the edges with salami.

DOOR, WINDOWS AND PATH: I stick square, lattice- shaped crackers in the gaps I made for the doors and windows, using goat’s cheese piped for precision to fill in any gaps.

Twiglets make the doorframe, and I thread slices of folded ham on to either end of two cocktail sticks to create an edible set of ‘curtains’, which stick to the cream cheese walls.

For the path, I use a row of small square crackers to look like paving stones, lined with pistachio nuts, and then plant lines of ham ‘roses’, made by twisting slices of bresaola (air-dried beef) into spiral shapes.

FINISHING TOUCHES: I grate plenty of parmesan cheese and sprinkle this around the chalet to look like snow. In the garden, I cut fir trees out of cucumber and make a snowman by threading two large mozzarella balls onto a cocktail stick, and add Twiglet arms, clove buttons and the tip of a miniature carrot for a nose.