Appliance failure is the mother of innovation…

… not to mention the easy peasy cheese(y)cake

This recipe (dedicated to the very patient Stompergirl) has been roadtested by not only my personal team of three little taste-testers (who love to check that my cooking isn’t “poisonous” LOL), but also by the staff at the school where I work and by a number of bloggers and friends who hit town recently and caught up at Little Smarties (FAB children’s clothing shop in Kew, see link on the left). Gotta love a combo of shopping, friends, champagne and cheesecake :)

It is just ridiculously easy and doesn’t even require the use of an oven. This is because just before I needed to provide the aforementioned morning tea, my oven died and my dreams of making a sampler of bitesized cheesecake portions shattered. A quick google search for “recipe cheesecake no bake” later, I threw together a couple of different results (using the added melted chocolate from one, the shortbread base from another etc) and created this now treasured addition to my repertoire. Of course, the oven was resurrected in time for morning tea, so I added some baked cheesecakes to the platter as well – variations on a theme kind of thing. But really, from now on, will I bother to bake?

So, take a packet of shortbread biscuits, put in a freezer bag, crush with rolling pin and add about 50g of melted butter and mix together. Press into tin (baking paper/sprayed/buttered/greased) - or if you’re into all things mini like me, put into individual patty pans - and refrigerate. Take a 250g pkt of cream cheese, leave it out of the fridge for a while til it’s soft, add a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice and mix. Add a couple of teaspoons of vanilla essence, a can of sweetened condensed milk and 100g of melted white chocolate and beat for about a minute, seriously, that's about all it needs. Pour on top of shortbread base. Refrigerate for a couple of hours. Tada! Yes, truly, that’s it.

You can fiddle around with it too – I’ve done these with strawberry puree (squishing fresh strawberries through a sieve and adding a little icing sugar), then pouring a little on top of the cheesecake and swishing around with a toothpick to make pretty patterns. I also did them with melted Lindt dark chocolate with orange filling – yum! Of course you can put a raspberry or strawberry or grated flake on top etc, etc etc – it’s all good or, as Sophie would say, “scrumalicious”. Oh, and when you have too much cheesecake filling, you can just grab some good ole Marie biscuits and create cheesecake sandwiches for the kids’ playlunches which is a v. popular move, I must say.....