Alrighty ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is the one you cheesecake aficionados have been waiting for since I changed up the base a few recipes back and have been stalling you on ever since. I’ve finally got the base recipe.
For those of you who just want the recipe, scroll down a chunk. As this is a food-adjacent blog, though, there’s a story to tell first.
Let me take you back to North Yorkshire in the 1980s. Throughout my childhood we were a family blessed with 2 things – firstly, an Aga, secondly, a mum who baked all the time. Well, if the Aga is on, it’d almost be rude not to. So mum baked bread, shortbread, Cornish pasties, and crumbles. And oh, that crumble topping was a thing of beauty! The fruit beneath – apples, blackberries, rhubarb, pear – was sweet and succulent, it melted in the mouth But that topping really made it the crumble to dream of. Didn’t matter whether you ate it with custard or ice cream, every Sunday lunch it would be there after the Yorkshire pudding and roast of the week. While fruit was plentiful, crumbles were baked in batches and frozen as necessary. So there was always crumble for pudding.
Anyway, We’ve continued that tradition, baking multiple crumbles when the garden has provided a glut of fruit. And as I’ve said before, when it came to experimenting with bases for the cheesecake, my wife pointed out that the crumble topping should make the perfect recipe. But it had never been written down! Even asking my mum for the details proved fruitless! “I just put in some flour, some sugar, some margarine” (Sorry, mum, you spelled “butter” wrong there). “Some” isn’t exactly accurate and doesn’t help. But this time, early enough in the process, I remembered that I’d promised you lot a recipe. So here it is.
The Crumble Biscuit Base
Right. Oven to 180C, quick spin around the ingredients Clive, then back to me.
Ingredients
- 8oz Self Raising flour
- 5oz butter
- 2oz porridge oats
- 4oz sugar
- Flavourings of your choice
Method
Begin by mixing the self raising flour and butter in your blender, you’re looking for fine breadcrumbs nothing too fine though. Add in the sugar and oats, blend a little more. For the flavourings you’re looking for things that will compliment the cheesecake you’re making. For this one we added a little Turkish mango tea powder – hah, I’m doing it now. 2 heaped teaspoons of the stuff. Then blend a little more. You’re wanting the soft crumb texture at this point, if you pinch it it will hold together. You don’t want it too claggy or fatty. If it feels wrong here, add a little more flour and oats.
The quantities here make a little more than is needed for the standard-issue 22cm spring-sided tin, so we’ve got a few silicone muffin cases hanging around that we made bases for at the same time. Press the mix evenly across the base and up the sides of the tin, trying not to make too large a build-up where the base meets the edge.
Bake for 12 minutes and it’ll look like this:
Mango Mango…
I blame Magical Trevor for the song.
Ingredients
This is pretty standard fare by now:
- 4 packs Creamfields cream cheese from Tesco. Whatever supermarket own-brand stuff you can get will work fine and is, by now, proven to be better than genuine Philadelphia,
- 1 pack Marscapone
- 9oz caster sugar
- 150ml sour cream
- 4 large eggs
- 100g freeze-dried mango powder
Method
I’m going to summarise here. Massively abbreviate the whole thing, just give you enough to get the job done. Did you want an essay on how to use a mixer? Didn’t think so.
- Cream cheese, marscapone, and sugar into a big bowl, blend together. Scrape down the sides and across the bottom a couple of times to make sure you’ve caught all of the sugar.
- Add the eggs and blend again, just until mixed thoroughly. Some schools say to add and blend in each egg individually. I bang all 4 in at once and mix it. But then that’s just how I roll. Live fats, die yo gnu.
- Sour cream, blend again, gently.
- Finally add the mango powder and mix thoroughly. it’s weirdly anti blending in completely, not quite as much as cocoa but not far from.
Started by only adding a couple of heaped tablespoons of the mango powder Same manufacturer as the passionfruit one, thought it would be enough. Wasn’t. Ended up just chucking the lot in! It’s interesting stuff! Where the passionfruit is a full-on powder, the mango is much more like very, very fine chunks of mango. And as it cooks in the cheesecake ix something really rather fun happens.
Pour the lot into your cooked biscuit base, back into the oven at 180C for 48 minutes or whatever time you’ve determined is the right one for your oven. I’m beginning to think that my oven might need 53 minutes straight off the bat as I usually end up giving it an extra 5 minutes these days.
And while that’s all baking, you can think about making the…
White chocolate ganache
You’ll need:
- 450g white chocolate – broken into small chunks
- 300ml double cream
Put the choccie bits into a bowl, put the cream into a pan and bring it to the boil. Hold until it’s just about to bubble over then pour over the white chocolate and stir very gently with a whisk. The chocolate melts, the ganache forms. If you overcook it and it all goes weirdly crumbly you can either (a) start again or (b) get 50g butter and stir that through. That should rescue it.
Once the cheesecake has cooled for a couple of hours in the oven, long enough to develop a massive canyon-esque crack right across the top, take it out and pour over your slightly cooled ganache. I sprinkled a little raspberry powder on the finished product.
You can see from the cut slice that the biscuit base is a ltitle thick around the bottom corner. I’ll fix that in the next iteration. But that’s what this is, a learning process. The tiny mango pieces have absorbed a little liquid in the cooking and have become little rehydrated chunks of delicious mango goodness, the ganache has set enough that you need a hot knife to cut the whole thing cleanly.
9/10, some notes re base. Will definitely do that one again.
