Lemon Cheesecake

I love reading the Lifestyle section of Sunday Times every week. In fact, I kind of look forward to it. It's trash to Hubby but to me it's interesting and magazine like. Other than the 3 pages full of comic strips, there's a page on Taste and it often comes with a nice easy recipe to be tried at home aptly named "Make it yourself".

That said, I only read them and seldom venture far enough to try them. I did once with a chocolate crinkle recipe and it was a huge success. My in-laws loved it and so does my Hubby. Recently, Hubby left a cut out yellowed page on the table and commented "I'd like to have a lemon cheesecake and I bought some lemons for this". That's that.

After careful examination, the page is from 4 October 2009! He has kept the page till now! Guess he wasn't confident that I was capable of performing this feat till now. With a request like this, how could I refuse? So 1 week later i.e. today, we went Carrefour to get the rest of the ingredients which he missed like cream cheese and sour cream. And off I went.

Since I had only 50g of digestive biscuits left in the fridge, I quartered the recipe and used muffin cups for the cake. It was like playing "masak masak" (children play pretend).

I simply zoomed in to the recipe section and did not read the article fully till later. Little did I know that all the key pointers were listed in the article! As it turned out, my cake cracked (oven temperature too high or could be due to overmixing since I took quite some time to mix the cream cheese and sour cream).

Here are the tips from the article again, for my future reference:

• Avoid overmixing
• Adds too much air to filling and can lead to deep cracks on top of the finished cake
• Avoid lumps in filling. Make sure it's creamy.
• Ensure sour cream and cream cheese are at room temperature before mixing
• Cook it slowly
• Oven temperate too high will create cracks as well.
• Allowing the cake too cool too fast will do similarly.

The result is a cracked cake with a slightly sunken center. But hey, the pic in the papers had a slightly sunken center too! I think I will be fine.

For the taste test, Hubby gave it a thumbs up. Yeah! He preferred it when it was straight out of the oven even though the recipe called for chilling a few hours before eating. Hmmm....

Lemon Cheesecake
(20cm round cake tin)
Adapted version

Ingredients
200g plain biscuits e.g. digestive
100g butter
4 eggs
175g caster sugar
500g cream cheese
200g sour cream
rind of one lemon, finely grated
juice of half lemon

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160 degree Celsius
2. Line the springform cake tin with baking paper
3. Crush biscuits and add melted butter. Mix well and press to base of tin to form cake base. Chill in fridge till ready to use
4. Beat sugar & eggs till creamy
5. Mix cream cheese and sour cream till smooth and not lumpy. Do not overmix.
6. Stir in lemon juice and rind to cheese mixture.
7. Combine egg mixture to cheese mixture.
8. Remove crust from fridge and pour in the filling from Step 7.
9. Bake for 40-45mins till the center of cake is not wobbly or the surface has turned from shiny to dull.
10. Turn off heat and allow it to cool in the oven with the door slightly ajar.
11. Refrigerate for a few hours before serving.
12. Have it plain or decorate the top with the fruit of your choice such as blueberries, strawberries or kiwis.