Pizza Sunday: Cheeseboard Pizza

Pizza Sunday is BACK! It has been far too long since Bailey and I indulged in the Sunday good stuff and with the Christmas holidays drawing all to rapidly to a close, we need a delicious treat to cheer us up before going back to work.

Today's Pizza Sunday is inspired by the fact that our fridge is full of cheese. Carefully selected cheese, purchased between October and Christmas and then lovingly stored in anticipation of the festive period. I had images of my Christmas guests gorging on cheese while enjoying a glass of port, filled with the spirit of Christmas and exclaiming "Oh what a wonderful cheese! Wherever did you purchase such a thing??!" ... In reality it was more like: "Right everyone, we have got s**tloads of cheese, I know you're full but you have to eat it or I'm going to kick off."

So Bailey and I decided we were going to take all the cheeses we had in the fridge (only the ones that had been opened. We still have more unopened cheese to get through) and make a pizza out of them.

I started off by preheating the oven to top temp and took dough made from my favourite bread recipe, Marcus of Country Wood Smoke's Best Bread. Earlier this week I made FOUR loaves from this recipe - two wholemeal, two white. I had saved a little bit of each dough back in the fridge then just rolled them out today - white for Bailey, wholemeal for me.

I started by covering the bases with ricotta, which we had left from our New Year's Eve dinner party.

I normally pop the bases in the oven on their own on the pizza stone for 1 minute before putting any toppings on but I forgot to do this with Bailey's white pizza so his ricotta went onto a cold pizza base. This actually worked out loads better as my ricotta bottom turned out looking kind of weird and cracked.

After the 1 minute stint in the oven I topped the ricotta with the motley crew of different cheeses we had in the fridge - Old Hag Wincle Ale and Mustard Cheddar from The Cheshire Cheese Company, some Edam and blobs of Camembert. There was also a Stilton knocking about but that has gone too pongy even for me to eat so we left that off.

My wholemeal pizza also featured the last scrapes I could get out of the jar of Mr Vikki's XXX Hot Chilli Jam - this bad boy has been out on every cheeseboard I have put together this Christmas and believe you me, it is amazing stuff. I was very sad to see the bottom of the jar today.

We were very pleased with how our pizzas turned out today, the bases were nice and crispy - you really can't go wrong with Marcus' bread recipe. We were also over the moon to use up some of the cheese in the fridge - this appealed to the 'waste not want not' Yorkshiremen in me and Bailey. However we still have two unopened blocks of Manchego and two unopened truckles from The Cheshire Cheese Company (not to mention two blocks of Parmesan from New Year's Eve) plus a bottle and a half of port, so if anyone fancies a night in at ours (you will need to bring your own chilli jam), do please let us know!