One of my Own....

For this recipe, I decided to go back to my first year of university.  We had a bit of a thing for cheesecake and of course, being students, we hadn't got a clue how to make cheesecake, so we guessed! this could have gone one way or another, but luckily for us, it was edible and quite delicious!  It was so much fun making it, and as you can imagine, there was a lot of mess.  We thought of a lot of ideas for a flavour and eventually decided on raspberry and white chocolate.  

When I think back to that year, there seem to be quite a few memories surrounding cheesecake!! For one, I remember a week that I was really ill and to cheer me up my flatmates went down to the shops and bought me a cheesecake!  Then one day, we decided to create our own for someones birthday which is the recipe I am doing here.  My flat mates even adapted this particular recipe for my birthday that year and made it with chocolate covered honeycomb which worked just as well. And of course, it didn't last very long...I asked one of my flat mates that year if she remembered this particular time and this is what she had to say:

The recipe we made is quite simple:

Base

About half a packet of digestive biscuits crushed.

2 tablespoons of melted butter.

Cheese mix:

2 regular tubs of Philadelphia or supermarket equivalent.

250ml of double cream, whipped until thick.

1tsp vanilla essence.

Sugar/sweetener to taste.

One large milky bar (melted).

Half a punnet of raspberries.

It is such a simple method that I was able to do it from memory. 

1.  Crush the biscuits until they are like breadcrumbs.

2.  Melt the butter and add this to the mixture until it has all bonded together.  Once this is done, spread the biscuit mix over the base of a tin.  I used an eight inch tin which worked very well.  Put this in the fridge to set.

3.  Whip the cream until thick and mix together with the cheese, sweetener and vanilla essence.  

4.  Add in the raspberries and melted white chocolate, saving a few raspberries for decoration.

5.  Spoon the cheese mixture onto the set biscuit base and decorate with the raspberries.  Then put back in the fridge to set.  Overnight work best for this recipe.

Turns out that you can use so many different things as utensils when lacking in a student kitchen! We ended up using a flat base glass to crush the biscuits as no one had a rolling pin or a blender.  It worked quite well.  But this time, I had mummy's kitchen to help me out, which is full of useful tools which half of them, I'm sure, have never been used. It took me no more than half an hour to make this and only about an hour for it to set so quite a quick easy recipe to do.  What I personally love most about it is that when you mix in the raspberries and they start to crush, all the juice starts to turn the mixture pink so you end up with a lovely pink swirl running through it.  However, unfortunately I used the wrong tin to make it in....it was far too wide so the cheese mix on top wasn't thick enough, as you can see in the pictures below, which was slightly disappointing, but it still tasted just as good!  The base was perfect and the cheese mix was quite sweet because of the melted chocolate but I loved it.  It adds more texture and flavour along with everything else.  Another down side is that once again I managed to cover mum's kitchen in all sorts of mess....pretty sure I'm not going to be allowed to cook there again.  But my brother on the other hand was incredibly grateful and definitely enjoyed my newest creation!  Once I had come back to university, mum assured me that once again, it didn't last very long, that I'm sure is down to my brother.