How to make Christmas Tree Cheesecakes

Hey, my Foodie Friends!! We are well into the festive period now and what could be a more fun alternative to Christmas pudding than these Christmas Tree Cheesecakes.

These individual beauties are great as a dessert for your guests and can be decorated with any fruit. What’s more, the kids can get involved and help you make them. Great fun and pretty yum I can tell you.

A simple but individual Christmas dessert. But how to make them?

C’mon, I’ll show you how…

1. Get all of the ingredients together

As always, let’s get the ingredients together before we do any real preparation, or start making the cheesecakes. Apart from the fruit, which you can choose depending on your guests, it’s pretty standard cheesecake ingredients. Cream cheese, icing sugar, cream, digestive biscuits, butter etc.

Hang on though, I know I’ve used fruit for the topping but you don’t have to. What about chocolate? Or even sweets for that matter! How about M&Ms!? Now they sound great, right?

2. The biscuit base

First of all, take the digestive biscuits, I use McVities but any brand will do, and crush them to the texture of crumbs.

You can make the fine crumb by putting the biscuits through a blender. However, if you don’t have a blender simply put the biscuits in a freezer bag and bash the biscuits with a rolling pin until you have a fine crumb. This method doesn’t take as long as you think and can be quite therapeutic!????

Next, melt the butter under a low heat and then add the crushed biscuit crumb. You only need to mix the biscuit and butter together until the biscuit has absorbed all of the melted butter. Keep the heat low and make sure you don’t burn the biscuit crumb. To put this in context, this should take no more than 30 seconds.

Finally, take the individual Christmas Tree moulds and spoon enough crumb base into the moulds to cover the base, and flatten down with a teaspoon. Then set aside in the fridge to set.

3. Make the filling

Now for the sweet stuff… Take the cream and whip it until it just starts to stiffen up. Be careful not to over whip. Then set aside. As a tip, if you do over whip the cream and it starts to split then just add a couple of tablespoons of unwhipped cream and mix it in and it should be fine.

Now take the cream cheese and whisk until it loosens up a little. Now add the icing sugar and mix in and then add the cream and mix again.

 

4. Make the Christmas Tree Cheesecakes

With the biscuit bases now set and the cheesecake filling made you can spoon the filling onto the bases. Make sure the filling fills the whole mould. Once full, level the filling off with a pallet knife.

Now it’s time to add the fruit, or M&Ms! I’ve sliced the fruit so that it was able to fit the moulds and create some texture. The method of slicing is dependent on the fruit. For example, the raspberries and blueberries were simply cut in half, whereas the strawberries with thinly sliced.

Once the fruit is prepared gently, and delicately place the fruit onto the cheesecakes pressing the fruit into the cheesecake mixture.

And there you go. Your individual Christmas Tree Cheesecakes are made. Put these in the fridge to set. This will take a minimum of 2 hours and I advise leaving overnight if you can.

Now the hard bit, getting these beauties out of their moulds…

5. Remove the cheesecakes from their moulds

There is no other way of saying this other than this can be a pain! What’s more, if you get it wrong the cheesecakes can end up as a stodgy mess. So what’s the best way of doing this?

I find using one of two methods gets the best results. If you have one, and I highly recommend you getting one if you haven’t, then use a kitchen blowtorch to gently heat the sides of the mould. This will loosen the filling and base and the cheesecakes should easily lift from the moulds.

If you don’t have a kitchen blowtorch then take a tea towel and run it through some hot water. Then, rinse it out and wrap it around the moulds. This should have the same effect as above and loosen the filling to release the cheesecakes. This can be a little hit and miss though so try it twice if it doesn’t work the first time.

The end result should be these lovely individual Christmas Tree Cheesecakes:

Now, just plate them separately and serve to your guests with a little garnish. Very festive and lots of fun. Yum!

OK, my Foodie Followers! That’s it for this time. I hope you enjoyed this recipe and give it a go yourselves. If you do, let me know how you get on. I’d love to know.

As always, many thanks for reading and until next time! Merry Christmas to you all…Steve.