The Daring Bakers - April Challenge

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abby's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

As part of my foodie blog project I decided to join The Daring Kitchen. This is an online group for keen bakers and, more recently, cooks as a whole.  Each month both the bakers and the cooks are given a recipe to make and report back on at a later date.

This month the challenge was to take a basic cheesecake recipe which consisted of a cream cheese filling with a graham cracker crust (the US alternative to a biscuit base) and elaborate on it.  I have to confess I can't really take all of the credit for the final recipe I used as I decided to base it on a recipe I've been dying to try for ages - Nigella Lawson's Lime and Chocolate Cheesecake.

The base consisted of the usual biscuits crumbs and butter mixture, but instead of digestive biscuits (or Graham Crackers) I used double chocolate chip cookies.  These were whizzed into crumbs, mixed with melted butter and pressed into the base of a spring-form tin.

Then, to make the filling it was simply a case of mixing together the filling ingredients and adding the juice of four limes.  This was then poured in the tin and the whole thing baked in the oven for about an hour until the cheesecake was almost set, with just the hint of a wobble remaining.

The cake was left to cool in the fridge before removing it from the tin and serving.  

I have to say this recipe was definitely a big winner.  The chocolate chip biscuits added, not surprisingly, a lovely chocolate flavour to the base and the limes provided a wonderful balance to the cheesecake filling which can sometimes be a little too rich or sickly for me.  As you can see, the cake browned on the top a bit but it had no impact on the flavour as far as we could tell.

The original recipe can be found here on Jenny's blog.  Nigella's recipe for Lime and Chocolate Cheesecake can be found in Nigella Bites.