Lime cheesecake.

If you want to make a decent baked lime cheesecake, I recommend following this Nigella recipe. If you want to know what happens if you ignore that recipe, read on.

---

I chose Nigella's recipe because, like the Domestic Goddess herself, I had been musing flavour combinations based on sweets, and chocolate limes were always a favourite. I made lime cheesecake once before, in the year or two after graduation when people assert their adulthood one overly-formal dinner party at at time (...or was that just me?). I remember I added all the lime zest to the batter, thinking it would add flavour. It did, but it also imparted a certain... grittiness to the otherwise silken cake. Not recommended.

The tin

The smooth, flat surface of baked cheesecake requires cooking the cake in a bain marie - a deep roasting tin filled with water is the traditional home kitchen set-up. Nigella gives excellent instructions for lining a springform tin with foil to prevent water seeping into the cake whilst cooking. Unfortunately I was not in my own kitchen and only had access to a loose bottomed tin. In the event, removing the cake was not a total disaster, but save yourself the adrenaline rush and make sure you use a proper springform tin with the belt-buckle fastening.

IMG_20200812_144139695

IMG_20200812_144405970

IMG_20200812_144534730

The crust

Nigella suggests double chocolate chip Maryland cookies for the biscuit crust, but as I couldn't find any I bought those soft-baked American style cookies and left them to go stale over a few days. This worked reasonably well in as much as I resisted eating them so had the 200g required. However, once whizzed to crumbs and combined with butter, they verged on greasy. In a similar situation I would recommend a combination of chocolate digestives or hobnobs and cacao powder for a more cheesecake-crust texture. I added a large pinch of ground ginger to the biscuit mix: it tasted good in the raw form but I didn't notice it in the final cake. Next time I would add more, and possibly also lime zest. I dutifully followed Nigella's instructions to line the tin with crumbs, and popped it in the fridge to set.

IMG_20200812_144936974

IMG_20200812_145525230

IMG_20200812_150002674

IMG_20200812_155827503

The batter

The recipe called for four large eggs plus two egg yolks. No-bake cheesecakes usually avoid egg whites because of the risk of salmonella, substituting whipped cream to aerate the cake. However, unlike American hens, British birds are routinely vaccinated so we tend to be less nervous about raw egg in dishes like mayonnaise, soft meringue and mousses.

With hindsight, it was the mousse connection which made me think to whip the egg whites in an effort to lighten the cake. Unfortunately, I was using rather old eggs and three of the yolks broke whilst I was attempting to separate them. No matter: I whipped the remaining three whites to stiff peaks (get your mind out of the gutter), and included all six egg whites and yolks in the batter.

Philadelphia cheese comes in packs of 340g, so two of them is not quite enough for Nigella's recipe. I figured the extra volume provided by the two surplus egg whites would compensate.

IMG_20200812_154015140

IMG_20200812_154608731

IMG_20200812_154127077

IMG_20200812_154557459

IMG_20200812_155321379

IMG_20200812_154851991

I beat the cheese, sugar, lime juice, egg yolks and three liquid whites together before whisking in the aerated egg whites. I'd normally fold egg whites into a mixture, but the batter already seemed too runny to allow for this. I poured the batter over the refrigerated biscuit base, and it was at this point I realised I had about twice as much batter as I needed to fill the tin. It's almost as though deliberately incorporating lots of air into the egg whites had created vast amounts of volume.

I put the leftover batter in the fridge and later made "cheesecake pancakes" with the addition of flour. These were pretty tasty, to be fair, but not worth making in their own right.

IMG_20200812_181921590

IMG_20200812_183619364

IMG_20200813_110656104_edited

The bake

Nigella suggests baking the cake at 180 degrees for at least 50 minutes until you can detect, and I quote, "below the skin, the slightest, sexiest hint of a quiver within" (you can put your mind back in the gutter now). This seemed quite hot to me, but a bain marie should stop the temperature rising too high and prevent the cheese-and-egg mixture cracking or curdling into graininess.

Given how much I had messed around with the texture of the batter, substituting liquid and whisked egg whites for the more solid cream cheese, I'm not in a position to criticise anyone's method. However, it is an objective fact that after about 15 minutes, the cake had risen like a banana bread muffin. I turned the oven down twenty degrees, but ten minutes later it was more cracked than the Lady of Shalott.

IMG_20200812_164849512_MP

94299783-8396-4e7a-95f0-faba10e6673e_edi

I gave up after half an hour. and removed the cake to a cooling rack. Fuming quietly, I peeled off layers of tin foil and debated how to disguise the mess. I settled on pressing a mixture of cocoa powder and icing sugar around the sides, and covering the top with strawberries.

I made this cake to follow a dinner of shredded chicken, roasted new potatoes and Caesar salad (back in the halcyon days of August when we briefly thought we might be allowed to socialise). My guests were unanimously delighted with the cheesecake, which I served alongside a third cocktail.