Tag: Cheesecake

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…

Love a good challenge, me. Eldest’s birthday earlier this year. “Can you make a Mojito sorbet?” Hmm… Let me see… Well, of course I can. That turned out well. Not going to post the recipe here, let’s see how your Google-Fu skills work out! It was simple, it was elegant, and it was damn gorgeous. Didn’t last long. And it led to the almost inevitable question “could you make a Mojito cheesecake?”

Well, here it is. A slice of it, anyway.

It’s using the basic recipe as laid down in pretty much all of the cheesecake blog posts on here. The latest full recipe with all the tweaks would be a good place to start.

For the base, it’s the new almost crumble/shortbread recipe with about 30g more butter to give it a softer texture. And a load of fresh mint and lime zest chopped in.

For the cheesecake mix itself, the usual cream cheese, sour cream, marscapone, caster sugar, 4 eggs with, again, lime zest and mint extract. I did add green food colouring to add to the mintiness presented to the eye but it’s not exactly stuck around during the cooking. Going to adjust that next time so the thing is properly shockingly green – or I might split the mix in two, make one so green the Hulk would be surprised at how green it is and then swirl the two together… Bake, cool, then spread lime curd over the top – sugar, eggs, lime zest and juice.

The final beastie, fresh out of the tin this morning…

So if you’re asked can you make a Mojito cheesecake, the answer is quite definitely yes you can.

But the next question is “what cocktail to try next?”

Right, so you know when you declare “this is it! This is the perfect cheesecake and can’t be improved!” the universe is going to come along and force you to do better? Well, this happened.

Last Thursday, the last lesson for my Year 13 A-level class, and I made them a Mars Bar cheesecake. And it was good but the caramel – which was, as usual, a tin of Carnation Caramel lightly harassed until spreadable – was letting the side down. I’d chilled everything between adding layers, as per usual, applied the ganache, and all was good. But when you cut the cheesecake, the chocolate ganache just sorta slid sideways off the slice, carried on a little river of caramel.

Something, thought I, should be done. So I consulted my culinary expert par excellance, my wonderful wife, and she pointed me to the millionaire’s shortbread recipe on the side of a tin of Carnation Sweetened Condensed Milk. I’m not going to repeat the recipe here, it’s on every single tin and you’ll need a tin – a 375ml tin – along with some sugar and butter (150g of each). The recipe is here on their website as well.

Well. Talk about a game changer. We actually made two tweaks to the cheesecake on this occasion. The first was to the biscuit base, taking the improved-but-too-solid base from my last cheesecake post. We added a few ounces of porridge oats (hard to be sure how much if I’m honest) to the mix, then pricked it with a fork all over when it came out from the 20 minutes bake. This gave us a base that was solid enough to support the cheesecake, not to go soggy after a prolonged rest in the fridge, and yet easy enough to cut with both cake knife and the eating irons of your choice.

The second tweak was the caramel layer. One batch of Carnation Millionaire’s Shortbread Caramel went over the top of the cake, then it was chilled before adding the standard ganache. Made the caramel with soft dark brown sugar on this first run…

A slice of the end result – pretty much the last slice, actually, the rest was devoured during Eurovision 2024.

Is this perfect? Nearly. Next time I’m using lighter sugar. But the caramel holds it’s shape when it’s cut, doesn’t glue itself to your teeth either. Consistency-wise, it’s a perfect match for the ganache and the cheesecake. And that base! Mmmmmm.

Onwards!!!