Creme egg cheesecake

20130401-161850.jpgI can’t remember where I first saw the phenomenon that is creme egg cheesecake, but as soon as I did I knew I had to make it. I googled various recipes which are available online, and ended up using a few tips from each one I found to make the following recipe.

I didn’t think I liked Cadburys Creme Eggs as they are so sickly sweet, but I found out that I do like them, especially when they are lathered in cream, cream cheese and sugar. Yum.

Creme egg cheesecake

9 normal sized creme eggs, 2 packs of small creme eggs, 700 grams cream cheese, 300 mls double cream, icing sugar to taste, 400g chocolate digestives (or more as I found the base a bit thin), 75g butter, some vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste

Crush up your biscuits and mix with the melted butter (or do as Nigella does and whizz it all up together in a food processor, although I find this makes the crumbs a little too fine). Press into the base of a 23cm or smaller springform tin (I prefer a thick biscuit base, so next time I would use more biscuits and butter – also, the chocolate digestives didn’t add much, so normal digestives would be fine).

I used my wonderful freestand mixer to make light work of the filling: whisk up the cream cheese with icing sugar to taste (bearing in mind that creme eggs are really sweet so you don’t want it to be too sugary), and then add the pot of cream and vanilla, whisking all the while. Making sure it is sweet enough to suit your palate means you have the perfect excuse to steal massive finger-fulls of the mixture. Yum. Don’t do it before dinner though, as you won’t want to eat anything else for the rest of the night if you ‘test’ the quantities I did.

Once it’s all mixed together and thick and delicious, quarter your creme eggs (apparently it is easier if you put them in the fridge first, but guess what? It’s Easter weekend and it is SNOWING outside, so it didn’t matter) and chuck them into the mixture. The point here is to stir them in gently so that when you eventually slice the cheesecake open, you will get lovely looking pieces of creme egg staring back at you. I think this is probably impossible to achieve, so I just ended up stirring them all in quite roughly to combine them into the mix. I was starting to feel a bit sick at this point from all my testing, so was ready to finish. Then pour onto your base and decorate with (unwrapped) mini creme eggs. Allow to set overnight if possible, as the mixture softens quite quickly.

One recipe I saw topped the cheesecake with 200g melted chocolate poured on top and then the mini creme eggs stuck onto that. I think that would look amazing but be a step too close to cardiac arrest, and would also probably make it a total nightmare to slice. As it was, mine looked a total state when it was sliced, but it did taste amazing, and it raised around £15 for charity so it was worth it. And licking the bowl was fabulous too.

20130401-161905.jpg

I love getting comments so please leave yours here