Lime Cheesecake

I have been asked several times what my so called signature dish is. Do I have one and is it really something so unique and extraordinary nobody else is able to make anything even close to. Hmm. 

Lime Cheesecake may or may not be my signature dish but it is definitely my "most famous dish". It did not only win the 1^st prize in a Finnish magazine’s (webpage only in Finnish: Kotiliesi) cheese dish competition in 2006 but a piece of my cake was also shown on the Finnish TV the same year in a very popular Finnish soap called Salatut Elämät (see Wikipedia in English ‘Secret Lives’). They used to have a shop in the soap and the soap shop sold, with other real-life products, this very magazine where my piece of cake was pictured on the front page and you could see the magazine on the shelf of the soap shop at least twice and at least for a couple of seconds both times...  - The circulation of the magazine in 2006 was about 160 000 and the soap was attracting about one million viewers per episode so even with overlapping readers and viewers at least one million Finnish people have seen my piece of cake. – To be precise, I did not make the very piece of the cake for the cover page; it was made by the cooks/food editors of the magazine, but it was my recipe!

This Lime Cheesecake I made last weekend. Please find the recipe below.

 Lime Cheesecake

Crust:

150g Digestive cookies, crumbed

75g butter, melted

Filling:

300g Philadelphia Light Cream Cheese (or equivalent, I use e.g. cream cheese brands of Lidl, Tesco or Aldi)

1,5dl / 2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla sugar

6 gelatine leaves

juice of 2 limes

3 egg whites

Decoration:

zest of 1 lime, grated

1. Mix the digestive cookie crumbs and melted butter.  Press the mixture into the bottom of a loose base cake pan, base covered with baking parchment. Let the crust cool and rest in the fridge while you make the filling.

2. Soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for 5 minutes.

3. Mix the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla sugar.

4. Heat up the lime juice and melt the soaked gelatine leaves in the hot juice and pour the smooth liquid into the cheese mixture. Mix well.

5. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them very gently into the cheese mixture trying to keep it ‘airy’.

6. Pour the filling on the crust and chill in the fridge at least four hours until firm.

7. Remove the firm cake from the pan very, very carefully on a serving plate and decorate it with grated lime zest. I have this lemon zester which I find very handy:

8. Enjoy!

++++ If you didn't do it yourself already, let your cat lick the crumbs from your plate.