Cheesecake galor!

Raspberry Cheesecake

Surprisingly enough, you may have guessed that this is about raspberry cheesecake. The other day my boyfriend and I spent the day revelling in the joy of the Welsh sun and decided upon cheesecake to make. It is horrendously easy, exceptionally tasty, but no doubt painfully fattening. But whilst eating it you certainly do not think about that - merely have fantastically amazingly tasty it is!

Ok, so you will need the following:

1 packet of biscuits (Hobnobs or ginger nut biscuits work quite well, the ginger giving it a bit of a twist)

50g butter, melted

50g soft brown sugar

250g mascarpone cheese

250g Philadelphia cheese

50g caster sugar

Juice and zest of half a lime

100g or so of raspberries

Method

1) Crush the biscuits in a plastic bag with a rolling pin / can of baked beans / heavy glass until they are crumbs. Put into a bowl.

2) Melt the butter and mix to the biscuits making sure there are no massive clumps of biscuits. Add in the soft brown sugar and mix.

3) Using a cake tin (I think we used a 15cm diameter one? 'Regular' size, anyway) line the bottom with greaseproof paper as this way you won't cut the bottom of it. If you have a tin which has a removable base, even better. Press the butter / biscuit mixer into the bottom of the tin and place into fridge whilst doing the next section.

4) In a bowl, mix together the mascarpone and Philadelphia cheeses, along with the caster sugar and lime. Mix thoroughly.

5)Retrieve your base from the fridge, and put the mixture over the base, spreading evenly.

6) Finally, put the raspberries on top for decoration and place back into the fridge for a few hours to set a bit.

7) EAT IT!!!

You can obviously make your own variations to this. We for instance, mixed raspberry juice from the frozen raspberries with the cheese mixture to make it pink! I personally think it makes it taste more magical somehow... We used frozen raspberries for ours, purely because we didn't have any fresh ones, which would have made the overall final presentation a lot better.

Another variation we have made in the past is getting a bag of frozen mixed fruits, and roughly separating the summer fruits from the forest fruits, blending each up, and then using the summer fruits as a topping with lemon rather than lime, and the forest fruits with the lime mixture. This second one has a wonderfully bitter sweet taste and is certainly my preference. If all else fails, we are going to spend all our time baking! And maybe selling it...

WARNING!

At all possible stages, bowl licking is mandatory! :)