When Baking’s A Bind, Make It Easy Peasy Lemon… Cheesecake! 

Whilst pulling pints in the local this evening I got chatting to one of my lovely customers who had a  hankering for some Lemon Meringue Pie. Sadly it wasn’t to be as it wasn’t on the menu and so I half-jokingly suggested that once back at home she should ‘don an apron’ and get baking. If you want something bad enough then it’s worth working for, even if it means going all Delia (or Nigella if you like to get kinky in the kitchen).

The customer laughed at the suggestion of baking and as the ‘customer is always right’ so they say, it got me thinking… There are times when baking can be a bit of a bore and it needn’t be, as there’s always ways and means to make things that bit easier.

So here, just for Heather and her good man ‘Will’ bobbing around in a boat somewhere on Lake Windermere, quite possibly without any oars or diesel  is a recipe that I like to refer to as my “B To Baking Lemon Cheesecake”. It may not be the meringue you were so craving Heather, but when life gives you lemons and all that malarky this is what to do with them!

Easy Peasy No Bake Lemon Cheesecake

Ingredients:

• 15 digestive biscuits (crushed)
• Half a tablespoon of light soft brown sugar
• 50g Butter Melted
• 1 X 250g tub of Philadelphia (full fat please, none of that ‘light crap’
• 1 X 200ml tub of fresh Double Cream
• 1 X 397g tin of Caramel Condensed Milk
• 3 Lemons, zested and juiced

Instructions:

1. Take the digestive biscuits and stick them into a plastic bag. Now get a rolling-pin and picture whoever or whatever may have particularly cheesed you off most recently, now bash those biscuits until they are crumbs and also until you feel better.
2. Melt the butter and brown sugar in a pan.
3. Now pour the biscuit crumbs into the pan and mix gently with a spoon (I bet you can’t do it without licking the spoon once you are done… I can’t!)
4. Now take the biscuity goodness and press it firmly into a cheesecake/ flan dish.
5. Pour the double cream into a bowl and whisk it until stiff
6. Stir the Philadelphia cheese and the caramel condensed milk into the cream.
7. Using a grater, zest the three lemons until they are naked and no longer have their shiny yellow jackets to cover them.
8. Put three-quarters of the zest into the creamy mix. Save the other bit for decor and final added zing.
9. Now chop the naked lemons in half and squeeze the juice from them. Poor sods huh? Life sucks to be a lemon!
10. Pour the juice into your mix and stir.
11. Spread the mix onto the biscuit base you prepared earlier. Blue Peter has nothing on you right?
12. Sprinkle the remaining zest on top and wang your finished cheese cake into the fridge.
13. Now let your masterpiece set for an hour or so.

‘Jobs a good en!’, no baking required, Simples!

You can use normal condensed milk for this recipe, but as the saying goes ‘you learn from your mistakes’… That is precisely how I found out that using caramel condensed milk for this recipe made the finished result the dogs doo-dahs!

Enjoy

xxx

Credit to ‘Bake Club‘ for the image. I promise to take one of my own pictures next time I make this recipe.