Early Pieday Friday – Baked chocolate cheesecake for Easter

_{Some items have been gifted}

It’s the 1st of March and I’m ready for Easter. Bring it on. There’s none of that lets-wait-until-April business this year. Easter falls on the last weekend of the month (I should know, my bestie is getting married that weekend!) so as soon as Valentine’s Day passed I was already preparing for the next big holiday. And so were all the supermarkets; tempting me in with slabs of chocolate and bags full of mini eggs. What’s a girl to do? Bake, that’s what! Today I’m sharing an early Pieday Friday recipe post with the intention of making you as excited as I am about the impending 4-day holiday. Is it the chocolate that I love? Is it seeing family and friends when everyone has a bit more time to spend to together? Perhaps it’s the pretty daffodils bursting into bloom that lift my spirits so. Whatever it is, I think that having a teacher for a husband means that I DO tend to arrange my life around the holidays, and our next break starts on Good Friday. Woo! So without further waffle, here’s today’s recipe post. It’s a baked vanilla cheesecake with smooth chocolate ganache topping and crumbly biscuit base. Piled high with mini choccie eggs. It’s a practice-run for Easter lunch and I’m completely thrilled with how it turned out. Creamy and cheesy and chocolately. And, because I used fat-free quark and light Primula cheese, it was a littler healthier than a classic cheesecake. What more would anyone want?

Ingredients: 12 digestive biscuits crushed, 50g-75g melted butter, 75g Primula cheese, 250g fat-free quark, 1tsp vanilla extract, 100g caster sugar, 2 eggs, 100g chocolate, 50g double cream.Start by bashing up the digestive biscuits into crumbs and mixing with the melted butter. I used 50g to start with but it didn’t seem moist enough (texture should be like damp sand) so I added some more. This may have been too much, but it tasted good, so I’m happy. Press the biscuit base into a loose-bottom cake tin with the back of a spoon until you have a flat base. Chill for about 15 minutes. The base I mean, not you. Whisk 2 eggs, the tub of quark, vanilla, sugar and Primula together – you could use 100g of this if you like your cheesecake really cheesy. I chose to use Primula Light but the original tube would work just as well. I just fancied a healthier cheesecake base to counteract all of the chocolate, cream, butter and sugar. Ahem. There are lots of sweet recipes online that use Primula as an ingredient so check them out and bake something a bit different today. Pour the cheese mixture onto the base and bake in the oven for 30-45 minutes until risen, set and golden. Allow to cool and take out of the tin. Position it on a pretty cake stand or plate so that you’re ready to decorate it with lots of mini eggs and the chocolate ganache. To make the chocolate topping use 100g chocolate of any kind you like. I chose milk chocolate. Break it into a dish and melt. This could be over a pan of water, or pop it in the microwave on a really low setting like I did and check it lots. Once the chocolate has melted, pour in the double cream and quickly mix until combined into a fudgy sauce. Add more cream if it’s a bit solid – you want it to run down the edges a little as you spread it over the cheesecake. Pile high with mini eggs and MINI mini eggs (yes these do exist, I found them at B&M) and shavings of chocolate. The texture of the cheesecake is much firmer and more dense than that old classic out-of-the-packet set cheesecake everyone remembers from childhood (mmm, I love that stuff – do they still make it? Leave me a comment below if you know). So it’s easier to slice and serve. It could be a refined plate-and-fork pud, but I wanted to smother it in cream so I went for the bowl-and-spoon option.

Baked Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe

Let me know if you bake this cheesecake for yourself by leaving me a comment below and tweet me your photos of finished bakes to @Cassiefairy.

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