Key Lime Cheesecake

My name is Caroline and I'm a cheesecake addict!

When I saw the letter for this month's Alphabakes was K, I immediately thought of key lime pie. Then I got a new recipe book for my birthday called Cheesecake, by Hannah Miles, and when I found a recipe in it for key lime pie cheesecake, I decided to make this instead.

I adapted it slightly from the recipe so to make my version you need:
300g digestive biscuits
100g butter
4 limes
300g cream cheese
300g Quark
397g tin condensed milk

First crush the biscuits - I find it easiest to do this in a food processor.

Fine biscuit crumbs

Melt the butter and stir in the biscuits

I also had the chance to use another birthday present for this recipe - my friend Jane gave me a springform cake tin with a glass-bottomed base, which is a great idea as you can serve your cake or cheesecake on the base and it looks like a glass plate.

It also comes with a thin plastic spatula which is for loosening your cake around the edges, so you don't scratch the tin with a knife. It's made by a company called Pampered Chef and I'd definitely recommend it.

Press the buttery biscuit crumbs into the base of your cake tin and bake at 180C for about ten minutes.

Finely grate the zest of two limes, and juice all four.

Mix the cream cheese and Quark in a large bowl

Add the condensed milk, lime zest and juice and mix well

Here's the cheesecake mixture

 Spoon onto the biscuit base and smooth over the top.

The recipe in the book suggested making candied lime peel to decorate then piping whipped cream on the top. I decided the extra cream was a calorific step too far, but I did try to make the candied lime peel. However I got sidetracked by something else and when I returned to the pan it had burnt! I had to think of another way to decorate the top as it did look quite plain, and remembered I had this tub of neon sugar that Dr. Oetker had recently sent me to review. It comes with four colours and I decided the neon green looked like lime and would work well on top.

The tub has four separate openings so you can use one colour at a time. After a few hours on top of the cheesecake the colour from the strands did start to run, but I put that down to the wetness of the cheesecake- I think these would be quite good on top of cupcakes.

Here are the sugar strands sprinkled over the cheesecake

After it was removed from the tin

The cheesecake tasted lovely with a zingy lime flavour that was noticeable but not overpowering.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge that I am hosting this month, as the letter we have chosen is K. I actually had to look up the difference between key limes and normal limes, and I'm not sure which I used- the only kind the supermarket had! I also noticed that while the recipe was called key lime cheesecake it didn't actually specify in the ingredients list to use key limes, just limes. I think key lime might have become generally accepted as the name of a lot of lime desserts, whether key limes are used or not!