Cheesecake adventures

Tomorrow is my sister-in-laws baby shower, so today I have been busy in the kitchen, getting everything ready for the day. My first adventure was to make a cheesecake. Now I have made cheesecake before once, and while I really liked it, I wanted to try and do it more 'my way'. My way involves basically making a cake without a recipe and figuring out what works! So here it is - a low-ish fat, yummy lemon cheesecake.


The base
To make the base of the cheesecake, I used a blender to crush a 250g packet of Milk Arrowroot biscuits.

I popped the crumbed biscuits into a small bowl, and after sifting out the chunky bits, I added about 150g of melted butter and mixed them together to create the biscuit mixture.

Using one of those super-duper flexible molds rather than a tin or pan makes my life much easier when it comes time to take the cake out later. Use your hands and a spoon to get the mixture flattened out and up the walls of the mold, and then pop it in the fridge to cool.

The mixture
Cream around 350g of Philly Cream Cheese in a small bowl.

 
I started mine in a large bowl but it was too big for my purpose so swapped to the small bowl half way through. Once the cream cheese is soft and creamy, mix in a 400g can of low fat condensed milk slowly. I squeezed two fresh lemons, heated up the juice and added a packet (3 tspns) of Gelatine to the mix to help the cake set. (I have made a similar cake before without the gelatine for a vegetarian and it was fine, just a personal preference.)

Make sure the mix is combined properly with no big chunks of cream cheese at the bottom (one of my newbie mistakes the first time I made this!) Pour the filling into the base and neaten the top up. The cake is ready to eat in a couple of hours or the next day.

I'm not a huge cook, but this really is an easy one and very impressive when you need to take a dish to a party. Essentially it's a base cheesecake, you could add berries or passionfruit to the filling just before you put it in the base to create different variations. If you have a go at making this, let me know how you went!