A bit of history for you, and context; I can't bake. If it involves something with flour, I am utterly lost and useless and it just ...doesn't work. Pasta-dough, cakes, scones, pastry ... nada. Even packet-mix cake mixes end up dry and horrible and just ...yeah. I can't bake. I'm a cook, not a baker. This however, worked, and worked well. I know baked cheesecakes are not for everyone, but they're really easy.
For this you will need:
2 lemons - Finely grated rind ~ 3tsp, and 1/4 cup of juice.
250g plain sweet biscuits
250ml thickened cream (or a 300ml thing to use it all up!)
175-200g butter, melted
500g cream cheese, softened (I use philadelphia cream cheese blocks)
3/4 cup caster sugar
3 whole eggs
Optional: Icing sugar and double-cream whipped to serve.
Method:
Firstly, pull out the butter and cream cheese from the fridge. You want this stuff to be soft to work with. You'll thank me later.
If you have one of those square blocks of butter in the foil wrapping? You want to use half to three quarters of one of those. Cut through the wrapper and the butter, put it into a small bowl. Cube the butter up, inside the bowl. Remove the wrapper first though, elsewise you'll be picking it out for forever.
Put the biscuits into a food-bag, and smash them up with a rolling pin, or the flat side of a meat tenderiser, or another bowl or ... you know. Just make fine crumbs with the biscuits. It's kinda time consuming. Get your kids to do it.
Melt the butter in the microwave. You don't want it to be completely liquid though, so little lumps of pale yellow butter in the darker yellow liquid is perfect. Using a metal teaspoon, mix the yellow lumps into the dark yellow melt and have nice creamy even butter. Rescue the biscuit powder from the little ones, put it into a bowl and stir in the melted butter. You can add more if you feel it necessary, but mix the butter and crumbs thoroughly. You want it to be crumbly at the end result, after all.
Using a crumpled handful of greasproof paper (Or paper napkin) take a swipe of unmelted butter and rub it along the inside of a springform pan (20cm diameter, 6cm depth). Be thorough, as this will stop your cheesecake from sticking to the pan, and this is a good thing.
Put your breadcrumbs into the pan, and press them down firmly. You have enough breadcrumbs to build walls in your pan, and have a breadcrumb bowl for your cheesecake mixture, try to make it even and sturdy. Put the pan in the fridge for ~15 minutes, or you know, while you make the actual delicious part of the cheesecake.
Now. You remember that cheese I suggested you take out and leave on the bench? You didn't do that, did you. I thought not. Do it now. And go sit down for five, ten, fifteen minutes until you forget about it and remember and go 'oh right I was making cheesecake!'
Open up the foil, and drop the cheese-rectangles into a bowl, and using a whisk mush and stir and whisk the cream cheese until it's no longer block-like and rather more smooth.
Add cream. Repeat.
Now, I say use a whisk, because a) it's neater than using an electric mixer and b) I was too lazy to set one up. Yes. Let that sink in. I amaze myself sometimes.
Using the fine-grater side of your cheese grater, grate the rind off of your lemons. Now the rind is the yellow part of the lemon. Once you hit white, that's pith, and you don't want that. Seriously. Do not grate the white stuff! You need small, thin, curly yellow bits of lemon rind that are very zesty and smell strongly of lemon.
Preheat your oven to 160 degrees Celcius or 140 degrees celcius if you have a fan-forced. So... turn it on now.
Cut the de-rinded lemon in half width-ways, and using a juicer (you know, the pointy hat thing with ridges over a jug that you use to hand juice things) squeeze all the delicious lemon juice out of your lemon. Be thorough. Squeeze and squash the thing, you want, you need all the juice these two lemons have. You should have 1/4 cup of lemon juice by the end of it. At least. Hopefully a little more.
Add the lemon juice to your cream and cheese whisking delicacy. Whisk until nice and smooth.
Add sugar. Whisk. Repeat. The more you whisk, the more fluffy and light your cheesecake will be.
Crack one egg into a glass. To make sure it's good. Add the egg to the mix. Whisk.
You want the egg to be mixed in smoothly and completely and then some. Repeat with the other two eggs, adding them individually. One at a time. The more you whisk between eggs, the better.
After the last egg, add the lemon rind.
You know what to do. Whisk that mother. Whisk it good. Whisk it hard. When you think you've whisked it enough, whisk it some more. Do your level best to make the liquid creamy deliciousness of your cheesecake mix to make like a milkshake, and you'll have done it about enough. The recipe I use says 'whisk for 1 minute' pfff. Whisk for more than that. You want bubbles. A major problem with baked cheesecakes is they are HEAVY and not light and airy and fluffy. This is where you fix that, and airy-fluffify it.
Hopefully your oven is preheated by now, so you can pour your delicious sweet lemony cream into your breadcrumbs, and pop that into the oven. Push it towards the back, to make sure it gets the even heat, at around the middle of your oven. Remember, cheese burns really easily. And this is a cheesecake.
Bake it for 50 minutes - 1 hour. Or until the top is lightly browned. If you go to shift it, it will wobble like woah, but the wobble will be less than the wobble of when it was raw. Instead of a liquid wobble, it's a semi-solid wobble. I don't know how to describe it, it's a different wobble, okay? Like the mix is all of a piece but not firm.
Leave it in the oven.
Turn the oven off.
Leave the oven door open to that first click thing, where the door isn't completely open, but neither is it shut, letting the heat escape. It'll take about 30-45 minutes. Basically until the sides of the pan are warm to the touch. If you are strong with the ways of heat tolerance (or it's cooler than that) pick it up with your bare hands and put it into the fridge.
If you're a mere mortal, using oven-gloves or insulation is a good idea. Your delicious and significantly now more solid cheesecake will need to chill for ~4 hours. I tend to leave it overnight, because better safe than sorry and I don't know about you, but warm cheesecake? Kinda weird.
So it's the next day, and the cheesecake is ready! Pop open the edges of the springform pan, caaaarefully pull it up. You'll likely get crumbs EVERYWHERE no matter how careful you are. So ...probably doing this on newspaper for ease of clean up would be a good idea. Using a knife, cut into your cheesecake, carve out a wedge and put it on a plate to serve. Mmmmm. Delicious.
Now I like my lemon flavour, so I didn't bother with mixing icing sugar with cream and whipping it for serving, and, admittedly, it does look a little plain on the plate, but my goodness it is delicious. You could get away with half of the biscuits, perhaps. You may end up with darker edges on the cheesecake, as the mix would be directly against the pan rather than insulated from direct heat by the biscuits.
Enjoy!
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