Recipe: Gluten Free Lemon Mousse Cheesecake

A recent(ish) meeting with some of my BFFs necessitated the creation of a cake, and there’s no cake like a cheesecake, but I could not for the life of me find a cheesecake recipe I liked the look of. I wanted a baked cheesecake for flavour, but something super tangy to offset a sweet lemon mousse I envisaged to go on top. Unable to find that perfect recipe, I concocted my own – with a gluten free buttery biscuit base to boot!

Ingredients

Biscuity Base
1 pack gluten free digestives (I used a 160g pack but in hindsight ~200g would be better)
100g butter

Cheesecake
min. 400g marscapone (I used 500g but it was huuuge)
360g cream cheese
150g caster sugar
4 large eggs
2 lemons

Lemon mousse
2 lemons
300ml double cream
2 large egg whites
60g caster sugar

Method

Making the buttery biscuit base

1. Melt the butter gently in a pan.
2. While that’s melting, put the digestives into a freezer bag, then bash the shit out of them til they’re crumbly.
3. Mix the butter and biscuit crumbs together and press into 9 inch cheesecake pan.
4. Refrigerate.
5. Ask on twitter why ‘fridge’ has the letter D in it.

Why do we shorten refrigerator to fridge when there's no 'd' in refrigerator?

— Jem (@jemjabella) May 12, 2017

Making the cheesecake

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C (or approx 170 if it’s a fan oven)
2. Separate the eggs, keeping both yolk and white.
3. Whisk the whites & caster sugar together until soft peaks form.
4. Mix together the soft cheese, marscapone, and egg yolks.
5. Zest the lemons and juice them into the cheese/egg mix. If you want a really lemony flavour, fish the lemon seeds out of the juicer and then tip in any pulpy lemony bits too.
6. Fold the egg white mixture into yolky cheese mixture, aiming for a nice even mix without beating the air out of the eggs.
7. Tip the mixture into your cheesecake pan on top of the biscuit base then place in the oven.
8. Cook for 40 minutes then turn off oven, but leave the cheesecake in there (this means it cool down slowly, which helps prevent cracks and stops it from sinking – but my first one did anyway and it was still gorgeous).
9. After approx 1hr remove cheesecake and refrigerate.

Making the lemon mousse
I used the lemon mousse recipe from Penny’s Recipes for this bit – it was so simple and exactly what I needed, so I didn’t see the point in re-inventing the wheel.

Don’t start this bit until the cheesecake is completely cool!

1. Grate the zest from the lemons into a bowl and then whisk together with the cream and sugar until thick but still soft.
2. Stir in the juice from the lemons.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff.
4. Fold the egg white into the cream mixture.
5. Spoon the mousse mix onto the cheese cake, level out and refrigerate for a minimum of 3 hours.

And tada! It’s ready…

This is a very decadent cheesecake, perfect to share with friends. Or eat it out of the tin with your fingers, I’m not going to judge.