Cookies and Cream Cheesecake

Apologies for the dark picture, the light is very subdued today.

Our flatmate's girlfriend has been visiting us from Sydney this past week and on Wednesday we decided to try our hands at making a cheesecake. I'm not really a big cheesecake fan, but I have been wanting to try cooking with cream cheese because I really want to make a cake with a cream cheese frosting, but I haven't been brave enough to try it because I think the Philadephia cheese has a funny taste to it.

This recipe uses Philadelphia cream cheese, and I was hoping it would assuage my fears. To be honest, I'm not sure it has. The frosting of my dreams is light and airy and doesn't really taste like cream cheese. This kindof did. Would I be adding more sugar to a frosting? Could that be my problem? I don't know. If anyone is reading this and can tell me what brand of cream cheese one uses to make a cream cheese frosting (that is available in Australia), please do!!!

Anyway, back to the cheesecake. This was not a baked cheesecake. The household voted, and it was 3 to 1 against a baked one. I was the solitary one, but I think I only wanted to do the baked one because I think it's really cool when you bake things in a water bath.


Cookies and Cream Cheesecake Slice
from Kraft.com.au

350g Oreo Original Cookies
80g butter melted
375g block Philadelphia Cream Cheese, cubed and softened.
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 cup thickened cream
3 tsp powdered gelatine, dissolved in 1/4 cup boiling water
200g white chocolate, melted and cooled slightly

Place 250g of the cookies into a food processor and process into fine crumbs. Add the butter and process to combine. Press the mixture into an 18cm x 28cm lamington tin lined with cling wrap or baking paper and refrigerate for 20 minutes.

Beat the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth, then beat in the cream. Stir through the gelatine mixture and white chocolate.

Roughly chop the remaining cookies and stir through the cream cheese mixture then pour over the cookie base. Cover and refrigerate until set. Cut into slices or squares to serve.

Sounds easy, right? Well, that's what we thought, except my wonderful talent for not reading recipes got us into a little bit of trouble. I hadn't seen the part in the recipe where it says to process only 250g of cookies, so I thought we were processing the whole 350g. We had bought two packets of cookies, which only just added up to 300g once the cream inside had been removed, so I had the great idea that we should scale the recipe to suit. So we reduced the amount of butter. So, our cookie base ended up with more cookie and less butter and is pretty crumbly in the finished product. Still tastes good, it's just a little messy. Plus, since we had processed all the cookies, we didn't have any to mix through. We used some chocolate chips instead.

It turned out quite well otherwise, except I still am a bit iffy about the cream cheese taste. I am going to forever be trying to achieve the same taste as the frosting on a carrot cake I received as a gift once - I hope that I'm not doomed to chase after it forever!