No Bake Vanilla Cheesecake

As an amateur in the kitchen, I am still, until this day - very scared of the oven, especially when it comes to baking cakes. Don't get me wrong, I love cakes and I do want to learn how to bake kick-ass cakes but oven is a very unfamiliar thing for me.

It's a box of mystery.

You put your pan of cake mixture and BAM..

Either it turns into something wonderful and delicious, 

or you end up with something horribly wrong and there's no turning back.

----

My friend Nicolas asked me and Ivana to help him make a cake for his friend and I thought this is such a wonderful opportunity and also a great excuse to get busy in the kitchen again! ha!
After talking with him, a cheesecake would be appropriate since his friend loves cheesecake. We made a plan to make the cheesecake on Friday night, but Ivana and I decided to do a trial cheesecake beforehand.

We made a plain vanilla cheesecake as a trial. I used  bbcgoodfood's Strawberry Cheesecake in 4 easy steps 's recipe for this experiment with some tweeks along the way.
Apart from (obviously) not using any strawberry, we used thickened cream instead of double cream (because we have a pot of thickened cream laying around in the fridge, so we might as well use it, right?), Nice biscuits instead of digestive biscuits (budget-cutting strategy right there, ladies and gentlemen), a few drops of vanilla essence and also some firming agent. The biscuit base was delicious and earthy with the addition of cinnamon, and the cheesecake itself wasn't too sweet (which I personally enjoyed). We used agar-agar instead of gelatine because we had no clue where to get gelatine sheets until now, but it works well and the cheesecake firms up nicely without being too hard or gelatine-y.

No Bake Vanilla Cheesecake

Adapted from BBCGoodFood

Ingredients:

• 250 gr Nice Biscuits
• 125 gr melted butter
• 1 1/2 tsp vanila essence
• 600 gr cream cheese (room temperature)
• 100 gr icing sugar
• 285 ml thickened cream (almost the whole pot)
• 1 tsp cinnamon (optional)
• 4 tsp agar-agar powder mixed with little bit of water

1. For the biscuit base, crush and smash the biscuit until it forms small crumbs then add the melted butter and cinnamon. mix to combine. The end result should look like wet sand consistency (eye-ball the amount of butter you add, make sure the crumbs are not too dry but not too wet).
Then, pour the mixture into a 22cm springform pan (lined), and press to create a firm base on the bottom of the pan and chill it in the fridge for 30 minutes (the longer the better) or you can bake the base for 15 minutes at 160 degree Celcius and then cool it down before use.

**We baked ours just because we had the time to do so

2. For the cheesecake filling, beat the cream cheese, icing sugar and a few drops of vanilla essence until smooth with a hand mixer.

While mixing, pour the thickened cream and agar agar and blend well.

The mixture will be slightly runny but it will firm up nicely afterwards!

3. Pour the cheesecake filling onto the the biscuit base that we made earlier. Make sure to spread the filling well and tap the pan on the table a few times to make sure there's no air bubble inside. Smooth the top with your spatula and refrigerate overnight.

** I like mine with a bit of ripples and imperfections on the top, it gives a more 'homemade charm' to it.

The end result is very light yet creamy cheesecake. It's a very sinful dessert with all the cream and sugar in it but hey, it tastes good. ;)

Tchuss !