I have to admit I may have overdone the green. In my defence, I wanted it to be green (perhaps not this green, granted) because the last one was disappointingly not green. Lord Percy called, wants to trade recipes for purest green. The Hulk called, wants his cheesecake back. But he’ll have to fight Shrek for it. I know, there were a LOT of green jokes on the Facebook post. Apparently it looks like a kitchen sponge. Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. It tastes divine.

So I need to give you the proper recipe for this one as there have been some changes since the last time. I know, I know, each time I say it’s going to be the last time I chance the recipe but then I find something else to tweak.

I was Watching an Instagram reel about cream cheese. Yes, that’s how rock and roll my lifestyle is. If I can find it, I’ll link it here, because it’s germane to the tweaking. The gentleman in question (who’s name escapes me and you know the Instagram algorithm, if I go looking for this guy I’m never going to find the post again so we’re just going to have to wait for one of you fine fellows to find him or him to find me) was talking about the additives put into Philadelphia cream cheese, the fact that these additives aren’t in the supermarket own-brand cream cheese, and that if you check the batch numbers you’ll find that the Creamfields stuff in Tesco, the cheaper version of their own-brand dairy stuff, is actually identical to the own-brand and now I’ve said own-brand so many times it’s starting to lose all meaning.

Anyway. I bought a roughly equivalent amount of full-fat Creamfields cream cheese and standard-issue full-fat Philly, made 2 cheesecakes, with the only differences between them being the type of cream cheese and the type (and amount) of colourings added in.

Okay. So. Oven to 180C, 9” spring-form round baking tin ready on a tray, quick spin around the ingredients, Clive, then back to me. Please note, ingredients are in order from base to topping, some ingredients are repeated because they’re used in both base and topping..

• 6oz/150g plain flour
• 3oz/90g caster sugar
• 3-4oz/~80-100g butter
• 2oz/60g porridge oats
• 3tbsp fresh chopped mint
• zest of 1 lime
• 3 packs / 600g Creamfields full-fat cream cheese
• 1 pack Marscapone
• 300ml Sour Cream / Créme Fraiche
• 4 eggs
• 8oz/240g caster sugar
• Zest of another lime
• Green powdered food colouring (OPTIONAL)
• 5 tbsp fresh chopped mint
• 5 tbsp caster sugar
• All the ingredients listed here: BBC Good Food Lime Curd (2 more eggs, more caster sugar, a bit more butter, the juice of those 2 limes, and the zest of a 3rd).

The Base

Right. This is damn near perfect. Biscuity, crunchy, doesn’t go soggy after a couple of days in the fridge. Get your food processor ready, it’s going to do all the hard work for you.

1. Butter and flour into the mixer, blitz into crumbs
2. Add the sugar, blitz again
3. Add the oats, blitz again
4. Add the chopped mint and the lime zest, give it a final blitz, then tip into the 9” circular tin.
5. Press down fairly firmly and evenly, bake for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile…

The Cheesecake Mix

1. Cream cheese, Marscapone, and caster sugar into a big bowl. No, not that one. Bigger. Seriously, the mixing bowl I use is about 2 feet across, it’s massive. Why? Dunno, but it makes it easier for me to mix the stuff. Anyway. Get your mixer and mix it all thoroughly at a fairly slow speed. Just be thorough, don’t over-work the mix.
2. Add the eggs. The recipe I started with has you adding each egg individually and blending it in. I just whack all 4 in and mix. Again, slowish speed, thorough blending.
3. Add the sour cream or créme fraiche – I’d actually almost run out of sour cream this time so used ~100ml sour cream and 300ml créme fraiche. This has devolved from a technically precise thou-shalt-use-entirely-accurate-measurements recipe into a yeah-chuck-it-in-its-close-enough entity. Eyeball it. Does it look right? Then it’ll probably work. Oh, yeah, add the lime zest and then mix everything thoroughly again. Grab a big spatula and make sure you scrape down the sides, get everything incorporated.
4. And this is where I freely admit I went a bit heavy handed. In my defence it’s been a long time since I used these food colourings and if I’d ever known they went darker when baked I’d forgotten completely. To digress slightly… Many years ago I applied for the Great British Bake-Off. I did rather well (but didn’t make it to the TV stage for reasons that involve a Victoria sponge-shaped disaster). One of the essential skills they recommended you had was baking Macarons. So I found an expert online and got their (sadly no longer available) kit. The fantastic Mademoiselle Macaron up in Edinburgh sent me the required kit, including a collection of powdered food colourings. No green, but there’s a blue, and a yellow, and I remember colour theory. The liquid green colouring I’d used in the previous Mojito cheesecake had been disappointing, and any additional liquid changes the mix. So in goes some blue, in goes some yellow, a bit of stirring and suddenly we’ve a GREEN mixture. It’s darker than Riddler green, just about Hulk green, not quite Green Lantern green. That’ll do. Just make sure you’ve mixed thoroughly, otherwise you’re going to end up with pockets that are odd shades of white, yellow, blue, and anything in between. To be honest, that sounds pretty cool. I mean you could, at this stage, split the base mix into several bowls and add different colours to each one then swirl it together in the tin. That’d be fairly epic, think I’ll do that next time. Anyway. I mixed thoroughly at this stage, you don’t have to.
5. Pour into the tin, bake for 48 minutes at 180C, then switch off the oven and leave it open a crack to allow the cheesecake to cool slowly.

Elsewhere…

The Toppings

1. First mix your finely chopped mint with the caster sugar in a bowl and leave it on the side overnight in a warm place. This being the UK in summer, the kitchen counter was perfect. Cover it to avoid any unpleasantness with flies. The sugar absorbs the moisture from the mint then dehydrates and crystallises. Gorgeous.
2. Make the curd according to the BBC’s excellent instructions. You can’t go wrong with a BBC Good Food recipe, usually. Oh, but do ignore the unsalted butter bit, regular butter works fine for me. Oh, the curd may have got some colouring as well. Ooops.
3. Let the curd cool.

Finally

Add the curd to the top of the cheesecake. It’s a lovely fresh lime taste and it covers up any cracks that might’ve formed as the cheesecake cools. Twofer.

Fridge the whole thing overnight. In the morning, run the blunt edge of a knife around inside the tin to unstick it from the sides, take of the spring side, marvel at just how sodding green the thing is, then sprinkle over the mint/sugar mix.

Serve to anyone who doesn’t turn their nose up at it because it is so very, very, very green.

The Verdict

I’m going to discount the colour here. It’s green. It’s incredibly green. It is so green that Kermit would look at it and sympathise that it is definitely not easy being green. I mean, seriously, just look at that colour! Next time, that’s being toned down A LOT.

But… I thought it was essential to use Philadelphia. It’s not. The consistency, the taste, the texture, the creaminess in the mouth… All there with the cheaper Creamfields stuff. So that’s the way forward. Quantities might need tweaking slightly. 3 packs of Creamfields is 600g. I’d normally use 2 large packs of Philadelphia or 4 small packs, so somewhere between 660g and 750g. So the next one might well be 3.5 packs of Creamfields with the remaining being introduced to some toasted bagels and smoked salmon, some of the lime juice, a little salt and black pepper… Créme Fraiche is a perfectly acceptable substitution for soured cream as well, and if you’ve got both then use a bit of both.

I’m going to keep experimenting. The next request here has been a mint choc chip cheesecake. I’ve got some black colouring as well, so if I want a Halloween cheesecake I know what’s going in the base… Going to dig out the cocktails book now, see what others could work…