Lemon Crisp Cheesecake

 

 

Of all the biscuits available in shops, my favourite is the Arnott’s Lemon Crisp. Long before salted caramel became trendy, the Lemon Crisp biscuit with its creamy lemon filling and its short, salty biscuit casing was a pleasing mix of sweet and savoury.

I’d been dreaming of a creating Lemon Crisp cheesecake for a while. I finally had a chance to make it a reality last week.

Lemon Crisp Cheesecake

1 250g packet Arnott’s Lemon Crisp Biscuits (biscuits separated and cream scraped out)

125g butter, melted

2 x 250g packets cream cheese (I used Philadelphia Light)

1 x 200g tub light sour cream

1 cup caster sugar

3 eggs, beaten

½ teaspoon sea salt flakes

Oven temp: 150C

Separate the biscuits and the cream filling. They pull apart quite easily and the lemon cream is quickly lifted off with a knife. Set lemon cream aside.

 

Crush biscuits in a blender (if you prefer a finer base) or in a plastic bag which you bash with a rolling pin (if you like more texture). I prefer the latter.

 

 

Mix melted butter and biscuit crumbs together until well combined. Press into the base of a 20cm round springform baking tin. Put in the fridge to chill for 15 -20 minutes.

 

In a food processor combine cream cheese, lemon cream, sour cream, sugar, and salt flakes until completely mixed. Add beaten egg mixture slowly, until all is combined.

 

Pour the mixture onto the biscuit base and bake in the oven for just about an hour or until cheesecake is set.

 

Allow to cool before chilling in the fridge for about 2 hours before serving.

Decorate with a few more salt flakes or lemon zest. I actually used the little pink spheres that come from Pemberton Fingerlimes to add some zing and texture.

 

 

 

 

You can see that my cheesecake cracked across the top (very Dr Who...) and the one photo I took is not centred at all  but it tasted really good and that is all that matters - still like a lemoncrisp biscuit but in a whole cake.

 

 

 

 

 

Serve with a cup of strong black coffee. Serve to hungry friends at the end of a dinner party.

Home and a Wray - plum and basil crumble in a borrowed kitchen.

I’m currently house-sitting for one of my best friends who has gone to England with her family for about 7 weeks. She has been good enough to trust me with her house (and her pet chicken) until she returns.

The house has three main advantages as far as I am concerned.

1) It is huge.

2) The kitchen is also huge.

3) It is located just off Wray Avenue in Fremantle which means proximity to many good things.

Wray Avenue is just off the main strip heading south out of central Fremantle. Within a two minute stroll from the front door, I can get to 3 cafes, 1 bar, an amazing butcher shop plus a traditional Italian grocer.

Add all this foodie goodness to the fact that the kitchen is about 7 times bigger than the one I currently get to use and amazingly well-provisioned with equipment, and you will understand my euphoria. It’s a borrowed kitchen though so for reasons of privacy, I will only show you a photograph of the oven.

 

I am just a little bit in love.

First appearances can be daunting. It seems to be a big, shiny, gas-driven maroon brute of an oven. However, its intimidating appearance belies its sensitive soul – the temperatures are precise, the controls user-friendly. If It didn’t weigh several hundred kilos, I would run away with it.

So… a recipe to make the oven perform on all fronts.

Plum, basil and vanilla crumble. 

(Really! The basil fragrance works so well with the tart flavour of the plums and the sweetness of the fresh vanilla.)

For the fruit filling…

1.5 kgs firm plums

20 large basil leaves
seeds scraped out of 1/2 a vanilla bean

2 tablespoons Demerara sugar

For the crumble…

¼ cup caster sugar

¼ cup Demerara sugar

125 gms butter (chopped into small cubes)
1.5 cups plain flour

1 tssp cinnamon powder

To serve…

Cream (double or single) or ice-cream or custard.

I nipped around the corner to Galati’s (the Italian grocer), and snagged a kilo and a half of plums for a couple of dollars, plus some fresh basil and a vanilla bean. Oh, and let’s get some organic butter and double cream while I’m at it.

I chopped up the plums, combined them with half the vanilla bean and 2 spoons of caster sugar, plus about a ¼ cup of water and stewed them lightly over a low heat for about 15 minutes until they were all just soft, lightly glazed in vanilla syrup, and the plum skins had turned the whole mixture a glowing ruby-red.

The plums were poured into an ovenproof dish. I made a chiffonnade of the basil leaves and stirred them through. The basil taste can be quite subtle, so you may want more leaves depending on how intense you would like to scent to be.

(At this point,I discovered a couple of pears and a nashi that needed to be used up, so I sliced them up and added them in. Waste not, want not.)

The crumble is easy – place all ingredients in a bowl and rub in until all the butter has been combined. Scatter over the top of the fruit filling, squeezing gently as you go to get a decent crumble texture.

The oven (yes, you, oven of my dreams!) was set to about 160C and the crumble needs to be in there for about 45 – 50 minutes or until the topping turns golden brown.

Serve with cream. Share with friends! I transported the  crumble over to Katy's house (which is now a very pleasant 10 minutes' walk away) and reheated it in her oven. We sat outside in her garden and had a very civilised autumn lunch.

Expect to hear more about Wray Avenue and my cooking adventures in the near future. I'm currently on holidays and am planning some culinary adventures in this home away from home.

I am Viennese if you please.

What would we do without stock photos? This from freedigitalphotos.net.

 Being Viennese is my secret identity. Forget my complicated family history, my hotchpotch of Asian and European genes, and my two passports – in my heart of hearts, I am walking along the Ringstrasse, shopping for elegant clothes and jaunty hats. I imagine I spend my afternoons at the Museum Kunsthistoriches or strolling the Schoennbrun Palace grounds and that I pass my evenings at the Wiener Staatsoper or at the Wiener Staatsballett. In my dreams, I climb the gantry of St Stephen’s Cathedral and look out over the city to glimpse a view of the Riesenrad. I stop for cake at Demel Kaffeehaus or the HotelSacher.

This is not just some ultra-weird fetish on my part. When I was 15, I had just such a visit to Vienna. To say it was life-changing is to describe it exactly. The foundations for my future personality were set that long weekend. Everything I saw and experienced was something I wanted for myself: an extensive knowledge of languages, art, history, music, architecture, fashion, and food. While I haven't been wildly successful in some of these areas, it has been fun trying, and I continue to try. It's as good a way of living life as I've found in any self-help book.

Going to the Hotel Sacher for Sachertorte and strong coffee is an abiding memory. We had cake there and we bought another Sachertorte to take home to England. It came in a wooden box, and for a long time afterward (long, long after the cake had been eaten and I had appropriated the box as a pencil case), it still smelled of chocolate. You can see the same boxes in the link that I provided at the beginning of this paragraph. You can also see that Sachertorte is now able to be ordered online. Hmmm....

Looking for a baking project this Easter weekend just past, I came across a picture of a Sachertorte online. I decided then and there that I was going to give it a go. 

Social media provided the means to do so. Very many thanks to @perthchocoholic for sending me a recipe by Pierre Herme and uploading it to Twitter in a series of photographs, as well as for the handy tip about thickening the chocolate glaze on a tray.

I couldn't find 66% Valrhona chocolate, so I had to go with 55% from The Grocer as the best that was available locally. I wonder what the chefs at Hotel Sacher would have to say about my very Australian Monbulk Apricot Jam?

Making the cake batter took ages - the bulk of that time being spent whipping up the seven egg whites.My fault - I should have had the eggs at room temperature.

 

The resulting cake was not quite as dark as I would have liked. That was most likely my fault for not getting the right kind of chocolate.

 

A layer of apricot jam goes on before the chocolate glaze. I had to sieve this - I couldn't find any apricot jam that didn't contain apricot chunks.

Thickening the chocolate glaze. The Herme recipe assumes that you have a 'marble surface' to work on. I wish. However, a cool baking tray worked very well.

It was so shiny!

Once it had chilled, I tidied it up and replated it. In hindsight, I should have added more glaze at that stage because it wasn't nearly thick enough.

And the taste? The actually cake was not as chocolate-y as I'd hoped, and the chocolate glaze not as dense. However, it was a decent chocolate cake, and no one who was offered a piece complained.

Did it transport me back to the Vienna of my dreams? Not remotely. 

Did blogging about it turn up a link that shows how to order a real Sachertorte online? Absolutely.

Now please excuse me, my Viennese alter-ego has some shopping to do.

Waltz this way...