Cheesecakes, with a Nutter twist – Simply Baking

Today’s theme on Simply Baking is cheesecake. Our Nutter knows we’ll all be thinking with our sweet teeth right about now, but he’s changing it up a bit and starting with a savoury cheesecake (which some may prefer to think of as a quiche with cream cheese – I know that would appeal to me more than a savoury cheesecake). I’m hoping that he’s not going to be matching anything to the colour of this particular shirt today, unless he’s going to do a pea puree. Actually (it’s catching!), the shirt might be the result of the pea puree prepared earlier. I get the sense that today’s recipes might take a bit of time, given the speed at which Nutter is talking.

Let’s get baking!

Crab cheesecake

This is “dead, dead easy” (it’s the second “dead” that really reassures).

Base
25g melted butter
50g breadcrumbs
25g parmesan cheese

Filling
1 tbsp oil
1/2 red onion
1/4 red and yellow peppers
2 eggs
2 tbsp whipping cream
175g cream cheese
2 tsp capers
225g white crabmeat
170g prawns (cooked and shelled by the looks of things)
25g parmesan cheese

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.

Base

Melt the butter and add breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese. Mix them together while telling an anecdote about having dried parmesan on a pizza when you went out last night, oblivious to the fact that it makes you look a bit naff for going to the kind of place that cooks with anything other than the real stuff.

Get a loose-bottomed tin and pop the mixture into the base. It looks a bit scanty for the tin, but Nutter doesn’t seem concerned. He grates some more cheese in to fill the gaps, so feel free to do that, too. Place the tin into a tray so you don’t make a mess on the bench when it comes out of the oven.

Filling

Chop the red onion and fry it off in the olive oil. You can add some garlic if you’re not old fashioned about garlic breath, like Nutter is. Chop the red pepper and yellow pepper and add it to the onions in the fry pan.

While that’s frying off, blend the eggs, cream cheese and cream but don’t use a pretty bowl unless you want a patterned shirt. Even if the TV production crew tries to convince you that a pretty bowl is best, hold your ground.

If crab isn’t in season, you can use tinned crab. Of course you can. And you can call your frozen prawns “delicious”, too. Repeatedly.

Add the crab, capers and prawns to your eggy, creamy, cheesy mixture, season with salt and pepper and give it a good mix. Pop the fried vegies into your mixture and mix some more, then pour it over the base and smooth it down. Cook for about an hour, until it’s slightly rubbery on top. Sounds appetising! If it’s browning too quickly, cover with some foil.

Serve with a salad with chive vinaigrette. (Chop chives while looking in the other direction – he’s doing a much better job with the chives than he did with the leeks some weeks back. Mix with one tbsp white wine vinegar, three tbspns olive oil, salt and pepper.) I’ll leave the delicious chive garnish to your imagination.

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Lemon and Gingernut Cheesecake

A springform tin is a MUST for this dish.

Base
55g gingernuts
25g melted butter
3 tbsp lemon curd

Filling
900g cream cheese
285g caster sugar
1 tsp lemon oil OR lemon myrtle
zest of one lemon
4 eggs

The base

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees

Crush or blend your gingernuts and add them to the melted butter. Stir so that the crumbs are well coated with the melted butter. Put the mixture into the tin and press it around evenly with a spoon.

Take your absolutely delicious, tang-y lemon curd. Spread it over the base with a warm spoon, calling it cream cheese while you go, just to confuse your viewers.

The filling

Couldn’t be easier! Oh, this little taunt again. Get your full fat cream cheese, chosen for it’s lovely “indulgence flavours”, and give it a bit of a whip so that it’s fluffy for when you add the caster sugar. Add the sugar and beat the cream cheese and sugar together. Add the rind of one lemon, for the zing and the zang, you know. If you use organic lemons you don’t have to scrub the wax off. Plus they are zingier and zangier. Now you can add lemon oil or lemon myrtle, which is grown in the “paradise fields” of Australia. Add your eggs and beat until it’s all smooth and mixed together.

Pour the mix over the base, rhapsodising over how delicious it smells. Put in the oven and bake for one and a half hours. Once the time is up – and this is a pro tip, people! – turn the oven off and cool it in the oven. This avoids cracking.

Cut some slivers of stem ginger (if you must), then pipe some rosettes of cream around the edges of the cake. Pipe some melted chocolate onto silicone in lacy designs, and pop onto the cream with some strawberries (again, if you must – I think strawberries and chocolate on a ginger lemon cheesecake is going a bit too far with flavour, but I could just be being crazy).

Oh, Andrew, what delights will you use the Nutter magic on next week?

Related posts:

1. Simply Baking – souffles (with that Nutter twist)
2. Simply baking – a Nutter, bar none
3. Simply Baking – three teabreads

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