White Chocolate & Boozy Cherry Cheesecake ~ Recipe

Helloooo!

Okay, I haven’t written any of the posts I said I was going to, because Lockdown has melted my brain and between that and trying to understand the world as it disintegrates, and trying to vaguely educate the Smalls… well, honestly, I just haven’t had the energy!

However, at the start of this week I decided that I needed to do SOMETHING to distract myself, so I tried to make a cheesecake.

I have never made a cheesecake before apart from the one that I baked inside a cake for the Blogger Bake Off once… which I have made twice ever. So never a no-bake one anyway.

I couldn’t find a recipe for one that I really fancied, so I ended up just looking at loads of recipes to get the idea, and then made my own up! Luckily, it was a success and everyone but Arthur liked it – and he doesn’t like anything new, so that wasn’t really a shock.

Here’s what I did:

Make the base.

Ingredients:

250g digestive biscuits, crushed

100g butter, melted

Stir the crushed biscuits into the melted butter until fully combined, then firmly press the mix into an easy release tin that you have lined with greaseproof paper.

Put this into the fridge to chill and set for at least 1 hour.

2. Make the topping/syrup

Ingredients:

10 fresh cherries, de-stoned

1 heaped tbs Jam Sugar (or normal sugar if you don’t have that)

60 ml of your chosen Booze (I used Brambles Battenberg Cake Gin Liqueur)

60 ml cold water

200g white chocolate

Mash or blitz your cherries after de-stoning them. (I used the old straw-and-bottle trick to get the stones out of my cherries, and then gave them a ten second whizz in my blender.)

Put the cherries and all the other ingredients apart from the chocolate in a small saucepan and heat until they are boiling gently. You want to cook off the alcohol a bit and soften up the fruit.

Meanwhile, melt your white chocolate – either in the microwave or in a glass bowl over a pan of boiling water.

Once the chocolate is melted, put the fruit sauce and the chocolate together and mix well – if you want it to be smooth, then you may want to blitz it together, but don’t bother if you want chunkier bits of fruit through it.

Set the topping mixture to one side to cool down a bit whilst you make the cheesecake mix.

3. Make the cheesecake mix

Ingredients:

600g full fat creamcheese

285ml double cream

100g icing sugar

1 Vanilla pod/1 tsp vanilla extract

Beat together the creamcheese and the icing sugar until they are smooth, light and fluffy.

Then add the seeds from the vanilla pod/the vanilla extract and the double cream and continue to beat until it is all combined and the mixture is thick and smooth.

4. Construction

Take the base out of the fridge and spoon the cheesecake mixture over the top, smoothing it carefully and trying to avoid getting any bubbles under the surface.

If you want, you could add your syrup mixture to the cheesecake mix (if it has mostly cooled down!) and beat it through before adding it to the base if you want the whole cheesecake to be that flavour/colour.

Instead, I poured the mix over the top and used a skewer to stir it through/around the mix. (I think next time I will mix it through before putting it in the tin, though.)

I then sprinkled over a handful of white chocolate drops to finish it off, before putting it in the fridge to set. You need to leave it for at least 5 hours, or overnight, to make sure it has firmed up enough to not just collapse when you loosen the edges and take it out of the tin!