This will take you about 45 minutes to make. The cheesecake then needs to sit in the fridge for at least 2 hours before you can eat it (it’s best left overnight though, if you can wait that long).
Before you start to make the cheesecake, make sure you have everything you need. The ingredients are listed below.
- 11g sachet of Supercook gelatine
- 2 lemons
- 150g butter
- 250g normal digestive biscuits
- 200g pack of soft cheese
- 225g “Greek style” natural yogurt
- 397g tin sweetened condensed milk
You’ll also need the following equipment:
- Tin opener
- Knife
- Fork
- Spoon
- Spatula
- Whisk
- Drinking glass
- Big mixing bowl
- Lemon juicer
- Round tin with removable bottom (approx. 20cm diameter)
- Small saucepan
Now you’ve got everything ready, we can get going. In 3 hours you could be tucking in.
- Put the 250g of digestives into the big bowl, and break them all up so that you end up with evenly sized small crumbs. Put this to one side for a minute.
- Melt the 150g of butter in the saucepan pan. Once it’s all liquid, turn off the heat, and pour the digestive biscuit crumbs into it.Mix it all together for a couple of minutes, until the crumbs are all soaking up the butter.
Make sure to rinse the bowl out properly, because we’ll be using it again in a minute for the white “cheese” bit of the cheesecake, and you don’t want any lumps of biscuit in that.
- Get your tin ready and pour all of the greasy biscuit crumbs into it. Squash them down hard onto the bottom of the tin, to make a solid base. You can use the bottom of a spoon to flatten out and compress down the crumbs – they should end up level and compacted. Put this to one side, we’re finished with it for now.
- Go back to your saucepan and rinse out the biscuit crumbs and the fat from the butter.Fill it about two inches high with hot water. You’re not actually going to use this water in your cheesecake, so it doesn’t matter if you didn’t get all of the cumbs out – make sure you got most of them out though, and remember it’s not me who is going to be cleaning up after you if you manage to burn buttered digestives to the side of the pot.
Put this pan of water onto the cooker, on a fairly low setting – you want it to be hot but not boiling.
- Now cut the lemons in half and then juice them.Measure out 5 tablespoons of lemon juice and put it into a small drinking glass. You’ll probably have too much juice – you’ll have to pour the extra down the sink because you need only those 5 tablespoons. Put the glass to one side for now.
- Now get your big bowl, and put 200g of soft cheese into it. Break it up with a knife into small cubes so that it is easier to mix later.Now open the tin of condensed milk and pour it all into the big bowl. It’s really sticky and quite viscous, so you’ll need the spatula to get it all out of the tin.
- Mix up the gunk of cheese and condensed milk for a few seconds, and then add the yogurt. No need to actually measure the 225g – if you are using a normal sized ‘big’ pot, just use half.Now mix everything in the bowl with the whisk, until it looks like paint – it needs to be absolutely smooth. It’ll take a while to become smooth, so keep going.
- Once that’s done, put it to one side, and then put the lemon juice in the microwave for about 15 seconds.
- When the lemon juice comes out of the microwave, check it’s warm. Don’t stick your finger in, because if it is hot, you’ll melt your skin! If it’s not warm, put it back into the microwave for a few more seconds.
- Now stand the lemon juice in the pan of hot water, and add the gelatine powder to it.The Supercook Gelatine that you can buy in the supermarket comes in 6 sachets, each of 11g. You just need one sachet.
Now stir the lemon juice with a fork. Stir as if your life depended on it. You need to make a thick, sticky goo — not the floating ball of gelatine in juice that you start off with.
The gelatine isn’t very friendly, in fact it will try anything to avoid turning into goo. It will try and set to the side of the glass, and it will try to form a thick jelly at the bottom of the glass. It will try to stick to your fork.
- Once you have got the lemon juice and the gelatine to form a nice goo, pour it into the mixing bowl along with the yogurt, cheese and condensed milk.Whisk, whisk, and whisk some more. If the gelatine mix doesn’t get blended properly with this mixture, you’ll end up with a sticky mess, not a cheesecake.
- Once you’re sure you’ve whisked as much as you can possibly whisk, whisk a little bit more.Then get the spatula, and pour the contents of the big bowl into the tin, on top of the digestives.
There will be a lot of mixture stuck to the sides of the bowl, so get the spatula and scrape it all into the tin.
- Level out the contents of the tin as much as you can, and then put it on a flat empty shelf in the fridge, and leave it for 2 hours.
- It will actually taste nicer if you leave it in the fridge overnight, it sticks together better, and the base is more crisp – but it’s okay after 2 hours if you really can’t wait.