Blueberry Cheesecake

Cheesecake is one of my favourite desserts. I've been making them for a very long time - it was even the final piece for my GCSE Food Tech coursework. I've also made them many times for friends' birthdays. What I love about cheesecake are the endless possibilities. You can't just say you want cheesecake. Do you want it plain vanilla? Chocolatey? Fruity? Zesty? And this time my Mum felt like blueberry. Online, during my research, I mostly found recipes for baked cheesecakes and I'm not that great a fan of baked cheesecakes. Don't get me wrong, if it's delicious, I'll eat it, but no-bake cheesecakes are so easy to make. So I built this recipe off the foundation of 2 other recipes. Nigella's 'Cherry Cheesecake' from her recipe book Nigella Express, which is the perfect base to any cheesecake recipe, just add a flavour to transform it into something even more incredible. (And being the Nigella fan I am, I've watched her make it on her show!) I got the blueberry part from the BBC Good Food recipe 'Blueberry and Lime Cheesecake'. My Mum doesn't like lime that much, so I swapped the lime for lemon because blueberry and lemon are great together. Sweet, creamy tartness, and here we go.

I started by crushing my biscuits. Because I don't have a processor I put them in a bowl and crushed them with my rolling pin. I also had to melt the butter so that it would be able to incorporate easily with my biscuit crumbs. If you have a processor, simply blitz the biscuits until they're crumbs, then add very soft butter until it clumps together a bit like wet sand. After I had made the biscuit base, I pressed it into a 20cm loose-bottomed tin lined with parchment paper. This isn't a massive cheesecake, but the richness will make up for that. I pinched the edges of the biscuit base to make a slight ridge. When that was finished, I popped it in the fridge to firm up while I got on with the filling. Some recipes will say to pop it into the oven for 10 minutes, but that really isn't necessary. 

Next, I started with the blueberries to go into the cheesecake. I took 100g of the blueberries, 175g of caster sugar, 3 tablespoons of water and the zest of a lemon and put it into a pot. I let it boil gently. 

When the berries started bursting out of their skin (literally!), I removed them from the heat and strained them through a sieve, making sure to keep the juices they had released. I then allowed the berries to cool. 

Now for the part where I started eating stuff... The cream cheese, icing sugar, vanilla extract and 1/2 a teaspoon of lemon juice went into a bowl and were whisked away until they became one. Apparently, icing sugar is good in cheesecakes because it doesn't just ensure a smooth texture, but it also contributes towards the setting process. In another bowl, I lightly whipped the double cream and folded that into the cream cheese mixture. The cooked blueberries, now cooled, were then folded into the cheesecake mixture and with a twirl, I got the biscuit base out the fridge and spooned the silky mixture on top of it. 

After smoothing out the top, it was back into the fridge for my precious to set overnight. If you want to eat this on the same day, you need to let it set for at least 4 hours. 

So the next day as dinner was simmering on the stove, I took the opportunity to finish my sauce. The sauce I kept from my cooked berries went back on the stove on a low heat with the addition of the juice of 1 lemon (the lemon I had previously zested). If you don't want it so tart, half your lemon juice and if you like it really tart, add more juice. This sauce is completely to your taste. When it came to a boil after a couple of minutes, I turned off the heat and added the remainder of my 200g of blueberries. I left that to cool.

When we were ready to chow down, I carefully lifted my cheesecake and put it on a plate. Then with my cooled blueberry sauce, I created some sort of "artistic" design and it was ready to slice and eat. Wasn't that easy? The fridge did most of the work really! I absolutely love the colours of this dessert; red, white, deep purple. Another perfect dessert for this scorcher of a summer we're having - enjoy. 

Serves 6-8

Ingredients:

Biscuit Base:

• 125g Digestive Biscuits 
• 75g Butter, melted

Cooked Blueberries:

• 100g Blueberries
• 175g Caster Sugar 
• 3tbsp Water 
• Zest of 1 Lemon

Cheesecake Filling:

• 300g Cream Cheese
• 60g Icing Sugar 
• 1tsp Vanilla Extract 
• 1/2tsp Lemon Juice 
• 284ml Double Cream 
• 100g Cooked Blueberries 

Blueberry Sauce:

• Juice of Cooked Berries
• Juice of 1 Lemon
• 200g Blueberries