Oh my, a little wave of laziness is blowing over this blog... Probably the fault of the sunless heat that makes you want to have an ice cream in front of the TV more than turning on your oven to bake cakes! I should also mention that I'm taking advantage of my last week before going back to work to do a major cleanup of my apartment (yes, when everyone goes on vacation, I go back to work!). Back nonetheless, with a little greedy but still fresh recipe, since it's a frozen cheesecake.
I'm still in my no-bake period (it will actually be an opportunity to announce the book winner) and I wanted to test this recipe that has you freeze the cream cheese in the freezer. Good, technically the cake isn't completely no-bake since you have to bake the biscuit base with butter for 10 minutes, but compared to recipes that recommend slow-cooking the cream for 2 hours, we can consider it a no-bake cheesecake.
I picked the recipe from "The Happy Cooking Friends" which itself was inspired by Jamie Oliver's Black Forest Cheesecake. I followed Girlycooker's recipe to the letter (except I used cookies for the base) and I also made David Lebovitz's non-setting chocolate sauce recipe. It's a real discovery but the proportions were huge to cover my 6 mini-cheesecakes (if you make it, you can divide the quantities by 2, or even by 3). I froze the rest and it seemed to work, I think the good idea for next time will be to freeze it in ice cube trays and take out a cube or two to go with ice creams...
We enjoyed these cheesecakes with my friends during the quarter-final of the French team and they disappeared in a flash. The result is super indulgent! Still, I prefer the original cheesecake recipe. It's probably my Normandy side, but I love that tangy touch of fresh cheese that you find in the original recipe and that I missed here. My friends on the other hand loved it, so if like Girlycooker you're not a fan of cheesecake in general (or if you like it but want to change it up), go for this recipe which is less typical and milder in taste!
As for how to make this frozen cheesecake, nothing too complicated. Start with the base by melting the butter and mixing it with biscuit crumbles. Press well into a springform pan (large version) or into individual rings and bake for 10 minutes (be careful if you make a family version, it's super annoying to unmold, don't skip the parchment paper). For the cream, just blanch the egg yolks with sugar then add the egg whites beaten to stiff peaks, the whipped cream and the beaten cream cheese (it's the whites and the whipped cream that will give this airy side that dilutes the cheese taste a bit) and optionally add the chocolate shavings. Then, all that's left is to fill the pan or rings lined with biscuit base, and freeze for at least 4 hours.
Just take out the frozen cheesecake(s) half an hour before serving and unmold with a torch (or simply by removing the edge for springform pans). By the way, I found this point a bit annoying. You really have to time it right because in the mini version, the cake warms up very quickly (taken out too late it's frozen, too early it's melted...). I found it less convenient than the classic recipe that you can take out anytime and that doesn't suffer from the timing issue.
Still, I found this recipe really nice for a change and maybe I'll make it again in a well-chocolatey version.
And before you find the recipe to print, let me announce to you... 'drum roll'... that it's Yaëlle H who was drawn to receive "Cake without baking" from Marabout editions! Congrats Yaëlle, you'll be able to try the whipped cream again and make a good After Eight cake for Mom to celebrate!
And for the others, you can get the book at the price of 7.99 euros!
