Strawberry & white chocolate cheesecake

Here’s a quick and easy no-cook recipe for strawberry and white chocolate cheesecake. It’s one for those who don’t follow recipes, because it’s so easy you don’t need a recipe! (For those who like recipes, don’t worry – there’s a proper recipe here too.)

Ingredients

Biscuit base:

• Half a packet of digestive biscuits, crushed
• A handful of chopped walnuts (optional)
• A couple of ounces of butter

Filling:

• A packet of cream cheese
• Caster sugar to sweeten
• Some whipped cream
• Some white chocolate, grated
• A couple of drops of vanilla essence
• A punnet of strawberries

Decoration

• White and dark chocolate compound
  (This is confectioners’ chocolate – if you don’t have it, you can just use shavings of your usual favourite chocolate bars)
• Save some strawberries for decorating

Method

Make the biscuit base by melting the butter in a suitable pan. Then add the crushed biscuits and walnuts until they soak up the butter. (I crushed mine in the food processor, but you could just wrap them in a clean cloth or Klingon and whap them with a rolling pin.) Next, place this mixture in the bottom of a springform cake tin, pressing the mixture down with a spoon or by hand. Chill this in the fridge so it hardens up.

For the filling, put the cream cheese into a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until it becomes soft. Next add whatever you like until the taste pleases you. I added a few drops of vanilla essence, some grated white chocolate, about three tablespoons of caster sugar, a punnet of quartered strawberries, and finally I folded in some whipped cream.

Place the filling inside the biscuit base and chill again while you make the decoration. Here’s a picture of the undecorated cheesecake.

You can make the decoration as simple or elaborate as you wish. You could simply add some fresh strawberries and some chocolate shavings.

I wanted to try some fancy techniques I’d found in Le Cordon Bleu book of dessert techniques, so I went for various shapes and also tried marbling the white chocolate with a couple of drops of red food colouring. (But I think that deserves a posting on its own – perhaps another day.) You can see the result in the photo at the top of the page. It tasted just as good as it looked!

And what about a proper recipe? Here’s one from a cookbook I bought recently, but you have to bake this one so it’s not as easy as mine.