Baked lemon cheesecake
I like a cheesecake. Darac loves a cheesecake. There are even entire restaurant chains dedicated to cheesecakes. As such, I thought there might be some sort of demand for something in the line of a cheesecake. My personal preference has recently been determined to be for the baked variety, so here's a recipe for a simple but hopefully tasty lemon one, using a few slightly unusual ingredients.
Ingredients
- 1×200–300g pack of gingernut biscuits
- 125g butter
- 200g cream cheese
- 200g cottage cheese
- 100ml sour cream
- 2 eggs
- ½ cup white sugar
- 2 tablespoons cornflour
- 1 lemon
- A few drops of vanilla extract
Method
- Grease a cake tin well, preferably one with a removable bottom.
- Crush the gingernuts. I like to put them in a baking tray and bash them with a rolling pin. This is particularly good if you've had a bad day.
- Place the crushed biscuits in a bowl.
- Melt the butter in a saucepan.
- Pour the melted butter over the biscuits.
- Mix well, so that the biscuit crumbs are evenly coated.
- Press the buttered biscuits into the bottom of the cake tin.
- Place in the fridge to harden whilst you prepare the filling.
- Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 2 or about 140°C.
- If you want a particularly smooth filling, push the cottage and cream cheese through a sieve into a bowl, but this stage can be left out if you're feeling impatient and don't mind things being a bit more… lumpy.
- Separate the eggs, putting the whites into a clean bowl and the yolks in with the cheeses.
- Add all the remaining ingredients to the cheese and egg bowl.
- Whisk together the main ingredients bowl until everything is smooth.
- Whisk the egg whites into peaks.
- Fold the egg whites into the main mixture using a metal spoon, just until combined to keep in as much air as possible.
- Pour the mixture over the biscuit base (which can come out of the fridge now, just in case you were wondering).
- Bake in the oven for about an hour until you push a skewer into the centre and it comes out clean.
- Run a knife around the edge of the tin as soon as you take the cheesecake out of the oven to stop the top from cracking as it cools.
- Leave in the tin until completely cooled.
- Remove from the tin and eat!
As with all recipes, please do send in suggestions for improvements or any other comments, as I'd love to hear them.