Because you don’t live near a bakery doesn’t mean you have to go without cheesecake (Hedy Lamar)
White Chocolate Cheesecakes
Mmmm cheesecake! Who doesn’t love cheesecake? In fact, for me Christmas just doesn’t feel right without it. When I was growing up we spent every Christmas at my aunt’s house and she always made Delia’s fresh lemon cheesecake with frosted grapes. It is a fabulous dish and I looked forward to it every single year. I will always remember the anxiety it caused my aunt, who hoped that the cheesecake set and it wasn’t a flop. It never was! This cheesecake was also the first ever dish I made for my husband (boyfriend at the time). I think a way to a man’s heart is definitely through his stomach!
The following recipe does not use gelatine so no need to worry about the dish flopping over. Instead of using a digestive biscuit base, in line with lots of recipes I have seen, I made a gluten-free flapjack base, which seems to work quite well too. When I tried making the cheesecakes in a 12 cup mini sandwich tin, I had leftover mixture so I decided to make white chocolate cheesecake ice-cream with it.
Mini White Chocolate Cheesecakes and White Chocolate Cheesecake Ice-Cream
Ingredients (makes 12 mini cheesecakes or one big cheesecake)
For the flapjack bases
250 grams oats (gluten-free oats for those who would like to make this a gluten-free dish)
100 grams melted butter
50 grams of caster sugar
3 tbsp. honey
For the cheesecake mixture
200 grams white chocolate
325 grams of cream cheese (Philadelphia works well)
100 grams caster sugar
500 ml double cream
1 tbsp. honey
Method
- Preheat the oven to 190C /gas 5/375F
- For this recipe I used a 12 cup loose based mini sandwich tin. If you do not have this you can use a lightly greased 20 cm loose based tin instead.
- To make the flapjack mix for the bases, place 250 grams of oats in a bowl.
- Add the melted butter, caster sugar and 3 tbsp. of honey to the oats and stir until all the oats are covered.
- Add a heaped tbsp. of flapjack mixture to one of the bases and press down with the back of a teaspoon or an end of a rolling-pin. Repeat for the other 11 bases. You should have a thickness of about 1/2 cm in each base or more if preferred.
- Place into the preheated oven for 10 minutes. (I had some flapjack mixture leftover so I scattered this in a spare tin and placed it in the oven along with the sandwich tin. This will be used to cover the ice-cream later on so this is important.)
- After 10 minutes, take both tins out of the oven and leave to cool.
- In the meantime, on the lowest hob setting, melt 200 grams of white chocolate and 100ml of cream in a saucepan. Stir until the mixture is completely blended. Take off the heat and leave to cool.
- Place the cream cheese in a bowl.
- Add the remaining cream, chocolate mixture, sugar and honey and beat until well blended. At this point the mixture should have thickened.
- Add the cheesecake mixture to each of the 12 bases and level off the surface.
- Cover the tin with cling-film and place in the fridge for at least 3 hours.
- Take the cheesecakes out of the tin and eat!
- With any leftover cheesecake mixture, place in to a container and then in to the freezer over night to make the ice-cream. To serve, spoon some ice-cream in to a bowl and scatter over some of the leftover flapjack mixture. This is not as soft as normal ice-cream so you may have to take it out of the freezer and leave before you can spoon it out.
As this mixture uses double cream and white chocolate, I even made some white chocolate cheesecake truffles from the leftover cream and cream cheese.
White Chocolate Cheesecake Truffles
Ingredients for the Truffles
200 grams white chocolate
100 ml double cream
75 grams cream cheese
1/2 tbsp. honey
Decoration
White Chocolate Cheesecake Truffles
Leftover toasted oats from the flapjack recipe above or you can crush some digestive biscuits as well.
The method on how to make truffles can be found in my first blog post here: https://simplysuzyblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/baileys-truffles/ Instead of adding the Baileys to the truffle mixture, add the cream cheese and honey. After the mixture is chilled and hardened, you can roll it into balls and cover them with the leftover toasted oats.
Please give this a go and I would love to know how you get on.
Enjoy!
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