Making Cheesecake (Student Style)

I’ve been unable to post much since Easter thanks to university obligations (apparently you actually have to study to get a degree), which is a shame because I’ve had two posts in my head waiting to be written since then; one about making Danish pastries, and one about the Creative Writing Society’s trip to Wales. But in the meantime, here’s one about making cheesecake with approximately half the equipment needed (and this recipe (and I’ll be writing as if you’ve read it)).

The first problem was that neither I nor my housemates own a rolling pin. The second problem was that we don’t own any scales. The third problem was that I very much doubted that the digestive biscuits I guessed to be about 250g would fit in one of our plastic food bags.

My first solution was to break the guessed quantity of biscuits up and sandwich them between two sheets of cling film and crush them with a flat dish. This didn’t go too well. The top layer of cling film kept sticking to the bottom of the dish and I didn’t use enough cling film so I still had to separate my broken biscuits into two halves to crush them. Plus, if I’d have carried on trying to crush the biscuits with the dish, it would have taken forever.

My second solution was to put the biscuits in the dish and use a tin can as a substitute rolling pin. This worked much better.

It was much easier to get the right amount of butter, thanks to the labelling on its packaging.

Melting the butter and making the base. The recipe suggests a round loose-bottomed tin and baking parchment, neither of which we had, so I used a rectangular tin and tin foil instead. I do not recommend using tin foil as it creases and tears very easily, which means your cheesecake will end up in odd shapes and will be very difficult to remove.

While the base was chilling in the fridge, I started on the filling. I had never seen a vanilla pod before! Also I forgot that, while we don’t own scales, we do actually own a measuring jug, so I ended up guessing the amount of cream.

Vanilla pods

WHAT A LOT OF SOFT CHEESE

Before and after mixing the filling:

Once the filling is spread on top of the base

In the end, I didn’t unmould the cheesecake as the recipe suggests, but instead topped it while still in the tin. Tesco didn’t have any strawberries when I went in for ingredients so I used raspberries instead. Rather than blending some of the raspberries and putting the rest on top, I blended all of them and then grated chocolate over it.

It’s been about two months since I made this recipe so it’s a little hard to remember the verdict. It was nice, although I would’ve preferred having more base compared to filling and strawberries probably would’ve been nicer than raspberries, which were slightly sour. Also I would definitely recommend having the right equipment – it would’ve been much easier!