Recipe: Blueberry and Lemon Cheesecake

Recipe: Blueberry and Lemon Cheesecake

As some of you may know (you know who you are!), I like to bake. Not a big fan of biscuits or pastries, but I do like to make cakes. Big cakes, little cakes, cupcakes, etc. I came across the recipe but modified it a bit for my own convenience and tastes. I tend to find a lot of cake recipes too sickly, so I've toned down the sugar.

I'm a very amateur baker and am a big fan of recipes that just involve throwing everything together and then shoving it in the oven, so if you're equally inexperienced, you'll find the recipes I use a piece of cake -- pun intended!

So, without further ado, here is the recipe I used for Blueberry and Lemon Cheesecake

Time: 1hr prep + 45mins baking + overnight cooling
Serves: 8 (or 4, in my case... we love cake!)

Ingredients:
Base:
- Digestive Biscuits 200g (crushed)
- Butter 75g (melted)
Cake:
- Cream Cheese 500g
- Caster sugar 200g
- Natural Yoghurt 140-150g
- Medium-sized eggs x 3
- Lemons x 2
- Plain flour 50g
- Blueberries 125g
Topping:
- Blueberries 25g
- (Optional) Icing sugar (for decorating)

Equipment:
Wooden spoon
Springform tin
Oven
Mixing bowl
Whisk
Sieve (if using icing sugar)
Scales
Potato peeler
Knife


Instructions:
1) Preheat oven to 120C. I grew up in a place that favoured heavy-handed pesticides, so I habitually soak fruit and veg. You can just wash them if you don't want to soak the blueberries and the lemons.

2) Crush the digestive biscuits. You can put it in a food bag and smash it repeatedly with a rolling pin, or, if you don't have a bag, just put it in a mixing bowl and smush the contents using the bottom of a smaller bowl. Crush the bits you missed with a wooden spoon. Melt the butter, pour it in, and mix thoroughly. Place the contents in the springform tin, press it firmly so it's spread evenly over the bottom, and put it in the fridge for now.

3) Mix the cream cheese with the sugar in a clean mixing bowl. You can use an electric whisk if you're lazy or pressed for time. Then mix in the yoghurt, then beat in whisked eggs one at a time.

4) Peel the lemon skin of the two lemons, taking care to just remove the yellow outer but not the white inner skin (because it's bitter!) before you hit the flesh. Chop up the yellow skin ("zest") into as small bits as you can. Halve one lemon and squeeze the juice into the mix (1 lemon). Throw in the zest and flour. Fold the ingredients together so you don't mix in too much air.

5) Take the 125g blueberries one by one. Crush them (between two fingers or spoons) and drop them into the mix. This gets their juice mixing in. With raspberries, you can crush them in the mix itself, but blueberries have a tougher skin. Mix well and pour it into the springform tin. Smooth over the top.

6) Bake in the oven for 45 minutes. After that, turn off the oven and leave the cake inside for an hour. Then take it out of the oven and leave it to cool at room temperature (consider putting a lid of some sort over the top). Then refrigerate overnight.

7) Take the cake out of the fridge and decorate with the remaining blueberries. Dust over with icing sugar using a sieve (but I didn't use that in the pictures).

Enjoy!

Did it work for you? How would you rate the results? Did you modify it for your own tastes? Let me know!