cherry delicious!

So, after the success of my first Nigella cheesecake, and the not so successful attempt at a Sainsbury's recipe, I decided to revert back to Nigella and try a recipe from one of her other books.  This one is titled "Nigella Express".  To me this read as everything inside would be quick and easy to make.  And it should have been....but then of course, I came along.  As always I managed to make things much more difficult for myself than they should have been.  Once again I love the introduction to the recipe, and this time she talks to us about her opinions of baked and non baked cheesecakes and how they have changed:

"I had always been a committed believer that the only true cheesecake was the proper, baked cheesecake, but now I'm not so sure.  This improper, unbaked cheesecake, feature of many a seventies dessert trolley, has entirely won me over."

In a sense, I do agree with her.  Although the other way around.  I used to think baked cheesecake could never be quite as good as a creamy, set in the fridge mix.  However, the banoffee recipe that I posted previously was fantastic and when I compare this to the fact that one of my non baked recipe's didn't set, I was beginning to think baked cheesecakes were the better option.  But this recipe is wonderful!

Ingredients

Base:

125g Digestive Biscuits

75g Soft Butter.

Cheese Mix:

300g Cream Cheese

60g Icing Sugar

1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract

1/2 Teaspoon Lemon Juice

250ml Double Cream

1 Jar Dalfour Black Cherry.

Method:

1.   Blitx the biscuits in a food processor until beginning to turn the crumbs, then add the butter and whiz again to make the mixture clump.

2.  Press the mixture into a 20cm tin.

3.  Beat together the cream cheese, icing sugar, vanilla extract and lemon juice in a bowl until smooth.

4. Lightly whip the double cream and then fold into the cream cheese mixture.

5.  Spoon the cheesecake filling on top of the biscuit base and smooth with a spatula.  Put it in the fridge for 3 hours.

6.  When you are ready to serve the cheesecake, unmould it and spread the black cherry over the top.

Everything in this recipe and method went perfectly until it came to putting the cherry on top.  I bought the wrong cherry mix....typical of me really to grab the first one i saw.  So instead of being a thick sauce to spread over the top, I ended up with lots of whole cherries and a very liquid sauce.  Once again, mum was needed.  And she had the perfect solution.  I drained the sauce from the cherries and put this into a saucepan.  I then added 5 spoons of sugar and heated gently until it bubbled to thicken.  I popped this in the fridge to set and when i went to check it i had the perfect thick syrup to drizzle over the cherries which I had placed on top.  And I have to agree with what Nigella said in her introduction, that this unbaked recipe truly does compete with baked cheesecakes.  

When I think back about this cheesecake recipe,  it brings back so many different memories.  The first of which was a new addition to the family!  My Auntie had a little girl and it became noticeable that she was allergic to egg.  So mum began searching around for new recipe's that were specifically egg free and she found this one already in our cupboard.  Mum began collecting lots of recipe's that would be suitable in the years to come that didn't contain egg which would make things much easier when family came to visit!  The second memory that springs to mind is Christmas.  This used to be a family favourite before mum became diabetic and switched to the equally good low fat, low sugar recipe I made previously.  Every boxing day, mum would make this delicious cheesecake as our dessert and I can recall so many wonderful memories which have all been triggered by making this cheesecake!  All of my family sat around the table at lunch time, pulling the leftover crackers and playing games.  Had I not decided to make this one, perhaps some of these memories and days might have been forgotten.