I had never made cheesecake before Saturday. Not the proper baked stuff that you’d wait hours in line for at the Cheesecake Factory (I’m only half kidding about that – we waited at least 40 minutes…) Our family has an alternative cheesecake recipe made – of all things – with lime jelly (American translation: jello) and chocolate digestives. Which is absolutely delish but not the real thing.
I’d planned to make pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving and bought all the ingredients but then failed to read the recipe in advance and realise how long it took to be ready. So. Three weeks later (thank you God for long best before dates) I still had a LOT of soft cheese in the fridge and a dessert needed for our Sunday “Christmas” lunch with my family. The answer was clear.
As was the choice of flavour once I discovered this recipe from the BBC Good Food website for Sticky Toffee Cheesecake. It was actually a recipe for white chocolate cheesecake and a suggestion to spread dulce de leche on top. A suggestion I was more than happy to accept.
The instruction: “the filling should still have a slight wobble when it is cooked” had me somewhat worried. One person’s slight wobble is another’s seismic tremor. So I consulted for quite some minutes with Jen and Mum (so nice to have cooking geniuses on hand for all my food worries – can you please be always on call for such moments?) and we finally decided it had done the appropriate oven time and was probably good to go.
I got the chance to use my beautiful (it is Rasmus, it is!) peach glass cake stand to showcase it, and had a minor heart attack when I was releasing the cheesecake from the springform pan in case it all went horribly pear shaped. But it made it safely to its display stand and I recovered. Until I ate my first bite and then I actually died of joy. Because part of me thought that cheesecake that good must be really hard to make. And the fact that this was one of the most simple recipes I have ever undertaken AND is tasted that good?! I will be consequently making a cheesecake every week from now on… 🙂
Coincidentally, Sunday evening we collapsed on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn to carry on our march through the Friends series and the next one in line was “The one with all the cheesecakes”. So I leave you with this…
