New York style baked cheesecake with a rich yet light cream cheese filling and a buttery biscuit crust.
Whenever I think of cheesecake I think about the episode from the TV sitcom Friends where Rachel and Chandler discover the most luscious and creamy cheesecake they have eaten. And ever since that episode, I have wanted to get my hands on a cheesecake that would make me feel how they feel while eating a piece of that cheesecake.
The recipe that I am sharing today is my answer to that episode. The recipe yields a baked cheesecake that has a rich yet light cream cheese filling. I have made this recipe a couple of times now. Each time I have made it for guests, and after baking and letting it cool, I never found time to photograph it, even though it always came out really good. Its good that I didn’t photograph it then because the more I made it the more I gathered on tips and tricks that will help you get the perfect creamy baked New york cheesecake.
The original recipe doesn’t have a crust, but my mom likes crusts, and I have realized so do a lot of other people. Graham crackers are not easily available in India. While traditionally, one would use graham crackers in crust, digestive cookies are a good substitute for using in cheesecake crusts In India, you get McVities digestive cookies which can be used to make the cheesecake crust. I sometimes like to mix in a packet of Unibic’s Honey Oatmeal digestive cookies as well and am always happy with the results.
The recipe is adapted from here and I am so grateful for Katy to have posted it. The original recipe as is was perfect, but required a little tweaking to suit my and my family’s liking.
A few tips I have learnt from the original post (do check it out) as well as baking it a couple of times now, is to make sure all your ingredients are at room temperature. It is very important to keep that in mind if you want a smooth, creamy filling. Although its a vanilla cheesecake, I like the slight tang from lemon and recommend you using both the lemon zest and lemon juice. A 2-hour bake in my oven gives the perfect texture to the cheesecake. Cooking in a bain-marie helps the filling cook slowly and evenly, yielding a creamy cheesecake.
