Mexican Style Cheesecake

The crack is *supposed* to be there, I swear!

Hello Mexico, hello desserts!

For me, the best part of a cheesecake is the buttery biscuity base. Which is why I kind of pretty much tripled the quantities here so I had a massive amount of it. Feel free to halve or even reduce the quantities by a third if you are the kind of person who eats a normal amount of base. I’m all about the base.

Alright, now that my shame is exposed, I should tell you about this bad boy. It is slightly adapted from a fantastic Mexican cookbook which was calling my name one day as I clutched a book token and was wandering around Waterstones. I’ve not made any of the desserts yet, but the description of the crack on the browned top showing the creamy fluffy centre had me intrigued. My cheesecakes always end up with a big crack down the centre, so I was excited for the prospect of a cake for which this was actually expected!

Anyway, enough chat, this cake is fantastic. Spicy and creamy and crunchy and YES please.

Makes a cake which could easily serve 6-8 greedy people

Ingredients

• 50g butter
• 140g ginger biscuits
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 55g sugar
• ½ tbsp cornflour
• 180g Philadelphia cream cheese
• 2 medium eggs, separated
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 40ml double cream
• 40ml sour cream
• Zest of ½ a lemon

Method

Begin by melting your butter and crushing your biscuits. The biscuits can be blitzed in a food processor for fine crumbs, or done by hand for more boulder-like crumbs.

Pour the biscuits into a bowl and stir through your cinnamon. Pour over the butter and stir until the crumbs are all wet and combined.

Pour into a greased springform cake tin (mine was small, about 20cm) and smooth together with the back of a spoon. Leave in the fridge to chill while you get on with the topping.

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius.

In a large bowl, mix together the sugar and cornflour. Then add in the cream cheese, egg yolks and vanilla. Whisk with an electric whisk until smooth, then pour in the double cream, sour cream and zest and whisk again until smooth and combined.

Quickly clean the whisky bits of your whisk and then set them to work on the egg whites. Whisk until stiff peaks form, then carefully fold into the creamy batter.

Pour into the prepared chilled base and stick directly into the oven. Bake for an hour and 10 minutes until the top is golden.

Allow to cool completely in the oven before daring to remove it from its cake-tin prison.

Slice and serve. 

After these photos I grated some ginger chocolate over mine because I couldn’t help myself. Authenticity is hard.