Non-baked cheese cake

Apart from the baked cotton cheese cake that I made for my son's birthday, I also made another type of cheese cake, a non-baked one on the same day as we were going to attend a eat-together at a friends place the next day. And good manners dictate that we should bring something along although I am sure our friends would not mind even if we went empty handed.

And so, since I am in the mood for cheese cakes, I decided to make this non-baked cheese cake which I have not baked in years.

As the name goes, this cheese cake does not require baking. And since it does not require baking I decided to "bake" this into many small "containers" instead of one big baking tin. This way, I can take out small portions to consume (Yes, I did not bring the whole cake over to our friends' place. We brought only half the cake, which is in one container).

Non-baked cheese cake



Ingredients:
Crust:
125gm butter
250gm cracker crumbs **
50gm cereal **
80gm sugar

** Note: I did not use the crackers and cereal but I used instead about 250gm of Marie biscuits, crushed. And since Marie biscuit is sweeter than cracker crumbs + cereal, I reduced the sugar to 60gm instead of the original 80gm.

Cheese Cake
500gm cream cheese (I used 2 blocks of Philadelphia brand cream cheese)
1 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons gelatin (If you want it to be harder, you can add on a bit more)
200gm condensed milk
1 tin of canned fruit (I prefer peaches as the taste blends well with the cheese)
3/4 cup syrup from canned fruit
1 teaspoons agar-agar powder



Method:

Crust:

1. Melt butter and mix with sugar and cracker crumbs/cereal. (In my case it would be crushed Marie biscuits instead cracker crumbs/cereal).
2. Press(so that it is very compact) this to the bottom of the cake tin and freeze in the freezer for about 3 hours.

Cake:

1. Cream the cheese. Add condensed milk and lemon juice.
2. Mash the fruit (leave some for decoration) and mix into creamed mixture.
3. Melt gelatin in 1/2 cup syrup in saucepan and mix into creamed mixture.
4. Pour in the mixture into the cake tin (or "containers" in my case) that has the crust base.
5. Decorate and glaze with remaining fruit. Put in refrigerator for at least 5 hours. If you can leave it in the refrigerator overnight, it would be better.
   

This picture shows that the cake is still unglazed.

Glazing: Boil the remaining 1/4 cup syrup together with 2 tsp agar-agar powder. Pour it on top of the creamed mixture and decoration.

And this is how it looks like after it has been glazed.

You will see in my pictures that some of it is with foil and some without. This is because I lined my containers in foil first. And the reason is so that I can easily remove the cake from the container later.