life gives you lemons

[extemporanea]

Life doesn't actually give me random lemons with any notable success, my potted lemon tree is one of those knobbly-skinned ones which gives me more evil poisonous spine encounters than anything else whenever I try to water, prune or move it. It has quite a nice outbreak of blossom this year but has only ever produced one small, knobbly, inedible fruit in past years. And the one "lime tree" I bought from the nursery turned out to be, in defiance of its labelling, a sort of miniature ornamental thingy which produces tiny mini-me orangey wossnames notable mainly for the incredible faces Jo used to pull while eating them off the bush, as they're excessively sour. I should, as she suggests, probably try making miniature marmalade with them, sourness is, I feel, a deeply desirable marmalade quality.

So, when the craving for lemon hits me, which it does reasonably regularly, I have to buy them like anyone else, or at the very least resort to the fruit basket on my sideboard, which as a result of my grocery shopping reflexes almost always has lemons in it in case of a break-glass-if-lemon-craving situation. And when the lemon craving hits me simultaneously with a random cheesecake yen, I get creative.

My favourite cheesecake recipe is that BoingBoing wake-up mocha one (warning, (a) that's an incredibly annoying comic format recipe, I generated a proper handwritten one for actual cooking purposes, and (b) BoingBoing's downside in terms of its geeky owners is that they're very good at bypassing adblockers, which means I've almost entirely stopped reading it because the ads are so annoying). Below is my creative lemon variation. It makes a dense, smooth, rich, slightly moist cheesecake which I am now craving again, dammit.

DUAL-CRAVING LEMON CHEESECAKE

Philosophical preamble: white chocolate is not chocolate. It is An Abomination Unto Nuggan which has a nerve attempting to share chocolate's hallowed name. It is better classified as a sort of lame, offensive and inferior cheese. However, it has a tiny and marginal right to exist solely in order to enrich lemon cheesecake, as below. I will not be taking questions or criticism on this point.

450g cream cheese
30ml flour
120ml caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
finely-chopped zest of at a lemon, or two lemons if you're like me and like it sour
1 tblsp lemon juice
200g evil white chocolate, attempting to expiate its sins

Biscuit crust: 1 200g pack digestive biscuits; 60g butter, melted; 1 tblsp honey; anything between 1 tsp and 1 heaped tblsp ground ginger, to taste. (More is better in my book).

1. Preheat oven to 180oC (350oF). Break the white chocolate into blocks and melt it (I do it in a glass jug in the microwave at half power, but you can be fancy and do it in a double boiler over hot water) and leave to cool for a bit.
   
2. Make biscuit crust by crumbling the biscuits finely (I use the food processor, or the pestle from my pestle and mortar, or the bottom of a glass bottle. This can be vindictively cathartic to do by hand.) Stir in ground ginger.
   
   • Melt butter and honey together in the microwave and add to biscuit crumbs, mixing well.
     
   • Press into bottom and sides of buttered pie plate, smoothing and compressing with the back of a spoon.
     
   • Bake at 180oC for ten minutes. Turn oven down to 160oC (320oF) when you've taken the crust out.
3. Beat the cream cheese slightly to soften and remove lumps, and add the eggs, sugar, flour and vanilla.
   
4. Beat until smooth and add the lemon juice and zest; beat again.
   
5. Pour in the melted white chocolate and mix until smooth.
   
6. Pour into baked biscuit crust and bake at 160o for 40 minutes or so.
   
7. This is particularly good if you cook down a small punnet of raspberries in the rest of the juice from the lemons to make a coulis, and spread on top of the cheesecake.

This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports OpenID.