Daring Bakers April 2009 - Cheesecake Challenge

"The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge."

This month, the Daring Bakers set me my dream challenge - cheesecake. I ADORE cheesecake - plain, flavoured, you name it, I love it. And baked cheesecake in particular. I've made a few baked cheesecakes before - Nigella's Italian Ricotta cheesecake, and her New York one too - generally successful, but not mind-blowing.

So - we were given a simple recipe for a plain baked cheesecake, and were asked to be inspired and flavour it up. For our Easter Sunday family do, I decided on a rich Baileys cheescake - and it was FABULOUS. The recipe was simple to follow, stayed nice and stable despite my faffing about a bit with the liquid quantities to try and get a stronger Baileys flavour, and the texture was perfect. This will definitely be my cheesecake recipe of choice from now on.

You can see the basic recipe here, on Jenny's blog.

To customise it, I used double choc chip cookie crumbs for the base, replaced the lemon juice, vanilla, and 'alcohol' component with Baileys, and topped with grated chocolate. An absolute winner!