I went to bed the other night craving cheesecake. So I woke up and decided to try and make one! I’m not one for baking normally, I prefer cooking. With baking I find it really hard to judge how much I need of things and it’s important to follow recipes. I hate doing this. I guessed what I thought would be in a cheesecake:

• Icing sugar
• Philadelphia cream cheese
• Biscuits
• Butter
• White chocolate
• Raspberries
• Caster sugar

I wanted to make a white chocolate and raspberry one. I went to my local mini Sainsburys and stocked up. Since it was a mini Sainsburys I was limited in what I could get. I had to get milky bar buttons as my white chocolate. I wanted frozen raspberries as I thought they would be easier to work with, but they only had fresh ones. Only a few substitutes but I was convinced I could make it work.

I started out breaking up the biscuits. I smashed them in a sandwich bag using a rolling pin. I also added up some smashed up bits of white chocolate. I melted a bit of butter in the microwave and added that. Mixed them all in a bowl till it looked a bit like wet sand.

We had a great pan to put the cake in, it had expandable sides and the bottom of the dish popped out so was perfect for my cake. I lined it with grease proof paper just be on the safe side. I added the biscuit mix to the dish, and pushed them into the sides. We then put it in the fridge and went to get our hair cut. All about multi tasking!

We came back about an hour later so I started on the topping. I still thought I was making cheesecake. So I mixed the cream cheese in a bowl, I left this out of the fridge while we were at the hairdressers so it was room temperature. I started to melt the white chocolate over the hob, this took two attempts! First attempt the boiling water got into the chocolate bowl, the 2nd attempt the chocolate separated! I had to nip back to mini Sainsburys and get more chocolate. My next attempt was to stick it straight in the microwave. This was perfect but as I could only do a little bit at a time I had to do it 3 times to get enough chocolate to add to the mix. While this was going on, Matt was in charge of mixing in the icing sugar. I started off with little bits at a time, this was taking too long so I then added a lot and he mixed it all in. He was the taster and said it was good so we stopped. Added in the chocolate and we were done! I also added a drop of lemon juice.

We then added this to the biscuit base. I knew that once it was in there wasn’t much I could do as it would pull the biscuits up to the top. I dolloped the mix all around the base so it was all covered then added more to the top so I could smooth it all out. This seemed to work really well. This then went back in the fridge. I think you are meant to leave it over night. I wanted to try it that evening!

Before I served it up I put the 3/4 of the pot of raspberries in a pan on the hob. I put a bit of water in with some caster sugar. Let it simmer until the sauce was thick. I then sieved the raspberry mixture to take out the pips. I then let it cool down before drizzling it on top of the cake.

I added ten rest of the raspberries to the middle and cut up some more white chocolate for the middle. Once I served up the slices I added a bit more raspberry sauce. This was sharp so was a good contrast with the filling.