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Holiday post: No-bake cheesecake!
Frozen Peppermint Cheesecake
with chocolate crust.
This tasty, no-baking-required cheesecake is perfect for the holidays as either a cheesecake or parfait-style.
Super-illustrated recipe and instructions (with tips and tricks) below the cut! Warning, image heavy.
Frozen Peppermint Cheesecake
Time to make: Crust needs two hours of freezing before filling. Finished product is best if frozen for over 24 hours for cheesecake. Parfait can be served instantly, with no freeze period.
Ingredients:
Crust:
- ~2 cups chocolate wafer cookie or sandwich cookie crumbs
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup (half stick) butter, melted or softened
Filling:
- 8oz cream cheese, softened
- 14oz sweetened condensed milk
- ~2 teaspoons peppermint extract
- 2 cups heavy cream, whipped
- Red food coloring (optional, looks just as cute white)
- Peppermint candies, like candy canes or Starlights (for decorating and optional filling)
- Milk chocolate (optional, for decorating. Easiest in bar form.)
Ingredients!CRUST:
(if you're making it parfait-style, skip this and just pour mashed cookie crumbs into the bottom of your dessert cups.)
1. First, crust time. Melt the butter and let it sit while you crush the cookies (too runny and it's hard to work with).
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2. Crush ~2 cups chocolate cookies. The finer the better, but not quite powder. Crumbs, not chunks. I couldn't find naked chocolate cookies, so I had to buy sandwich cookies and scrape out the filling! I got a ton from all of fifteen cookies, if that:
Blech. You can toss that garbage..
3. Stir in the sugar and make sure it's consistent throughout. Sugar clumps are bad for the pressing stage of the crust.
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4. Mix the butter into the sugary crumbs. Get your hands dirty, it's the best way. Keep mixing and breaking up big clumps. When you're done, it should have the consistency of squishy-but-uniform pellets. They should squash together easily and crumble apart with little effort. Then it's perfect.
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5. Grab a 9" pie pan. Deep dish. 9" round cake pans work well, too. I like to line mine with plastic wrap so that I can pop it out later and not worry about the cookie crust sticking.
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6. Press the crumbs along the sides like clay. The thickness should be the same up the sides as on the bottom, and solid. Press firmly, or else it'll come apart when served. Loose packing=bad. Here's what mine looked like:
Now freeze it for two hours or so. Let the cream cheese sit at room temperature in the meanwhile.
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FILLING:
1. Combine the cream cheese, condensed milk, peppermint, and food coloring. Remember, it only takes a few drops. My dark pink was achieved in two drops of bright red (although it lightens some when added to cream), and peppermint extract is damn strong. Then go ahead and blend the hell out of it until completely smooth.
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2. Whip the cream yourself. I say do this because just buying whip is a lot more processed and you can't control the texture at all. SO! If you haven't whipped cream before, use either a whisk or a hand blender in a metal or ceramic bowl. Keep moving in small, fast circles. To make it go faster, put the bowl in an ice bath while you do this. When you can practically sculpt the stuff (firm peaks), you'll be in the right place.
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3. I (personally) like the way tiny crunches add to smooth desserts, so I went with chopped mints. It's also very pretty in the slicing stage. You can skip this step for 100% smooth cheesecake.
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4. Add the pink goop to the white goop and pour in the mints. Mix until no pockets of white or pink can be found.
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5. Pour it into your crust and freeze it!
If you're doing it parfait-style, skip the freezing. Pour the cheesecake mousse directly over the crumbs in the dessert cups and skip to decorating.
Here's how it looks after a day in the freezer (notice the shrinking):
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DECORATING:
Time to make this bad boy look nice. The things I did:
1. Sliced candy cane. Just slice it up into thin circles and press them into the surface.
2. Chocolate curls. The easy way to do this is simple: take a peeler and shred down the side of a Hershey's bar. The cooler the chocolate is, the smaller it'll shred. Same thing if you slice too thickly; chilly chocolate doesn't curl well. I let one side stay cool to fill up space in the center of my cheesecake, kinda like chocolate snow. It makes tasty filler.
For long, artsy curls, run the peeler down the long side. Softer ones keep their shape better. Here's a close-up of how some of mine looked (I tried to keep them small):
And for parfait style, just top the mousse with either of these and it'll look lovely.
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You should decorate at least an hour before serving, seeing as you'll want to re-freeze the cake. It'll lose texture as it warms, so chilling it before serving keeps it firm. =)
It's so good. I can't wait to cut into it tomorrow. =D
Enjoy!
-Haz
P.S.
Do you guys enjoy these recipes and/or the way I post them? Let me know if you want me to keep it up, because I have loads more food to chronicle.
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1 vote for yes :)
Though I'm tempted to try to mix in the food coloring afterwards, and only semi-stir it, to try to get a white-pink swirl look to it.
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