Lime Cheesecake

1. 01 Introduction: Welcome to this class. In this class, I will teach you how to make This lime cheesecake. First, I will teach you how to make the crust for the cheesecake. Next, I will teach you how to make the cheesecake feeling. Then I will teach you how to bake and cool the cheesecake. Next, I will show you how to make the stabilized whipped lime topping. Then I will show you how to make the candied lines. We will finish up with me teaching you how to add the finishing touches to your cheesecake. I am a self taught baker. Many years ago, I decided I wanted to open up my own home bakery. I had this business for several years until my husband got a job offer in a different city across the country. We felt like this was a good move for us, and so I closed my bakery and we moved across the country. Now in the new city, I do not want to go through the steps to open up another home bakery, but I still love baking, and as a retired teacher, I love teaching. So I have decided to share my skills with you on skill share. This class is aimed at the baker that would like to learn how to make a delicious lime cheesecake. I am excited to teach you the skills in this class. Let's move on to lesson number one, making the crust. 2. 02 The Crust: We are ready to start making the crust for our cheesecake. In this bowl, I want to put my butter, but I want to break my butter up into chunks so that it will melt faster. And we're going to put this in the microwave for about a minute at 50% power. While our butter is melting, we're going to get our gram cracker crumbs ready. To do that, we're just going to break gram crackers. And put them in our food processor. And I'm starting by printing one package in, and I just want to grind this. Okay. There's still a few big chunks in there? That looks much better. Here is my butter that I melted. I may need to do it another half a minute because as you can see, it's not quite melted. So we're going to put that back in for another half a minute. While that butter is going, I'm going to measure out my first cup of crumbs. This has gone another 30 seconds. We're going to stir this and see the butter is melting. I'm going to put in my one cup of grad cracker crumbs. Let's measure this out and see if we have another cup there, or if we need to grind some more up. That is not quite a cup that's about a cup and a half. I'm going to do just three more and see if that's going to be enough. One. 23. I don't want to get way too many crumbs, and I can always do more. Let's do this. A. Let's measure this out. That's basically another cup. Let's scrape all this. I wasn't quite another cup, but I think it's close enough. Let's add our three tablespoons of sugar. Then we just want to stir this all together. Once we have it all st together, There's no dry. It's all moistened with the butter, like that. We're ready to put this into our pan. We are using a spring form pan. That means the bottom comes out. Let's go ahead and close that back up. And it locks in place. Now, we want to spray our pan down so that the crust does not stick. And then we're going to put our crust in our pen, and we want to spread it around. I find at this point, it's just as easy to use my fingers, and I do want it to come up the sides. Not all the way up, but at about an inch up. I'm getting that side part it's coming up. Once I get it coming up the side like I want, then I can push it down and smooth the rest on the bottom. I want it to be as close as possible, the same thickness all the way around. I am pushing. You'll see at the corners where the side in the bottom meets.'s get that firmly in there and not a slope. With that done, We're going to put this in the oven and bake it for 10 minutes. We'll be back in 10 minutes when that crust is baked to take it out of the oven and let it cool, so it'll be ready for the cheesecake feeling. The timer has just gone off on the oven, so we're going to take it out and let the crust cool. We're now going to let this crust completely cool before we add the feeling to it. In our next lesson, we will be making the feeling for our cheesecake. O 3. 03 The Filling: We are ready to start making the lime cheesecake feeling. We need to start by getting the limes ready. The recipe calls for the zest from one line. To do that I'm using this very fine, and I'm just going to run the line down it. I want to get go there, but do not go into the white because the white is very bitter. We want to get that green off, but we're trying not to go into the white. We're just doing a little bit at a time as we work our way around the line. We're also going to use this lime as part of the juice for the one half cup of lime juice. Now, you can totally juice limes and get your lime juice that way. I find it's just easier once I've used the amount of lime that's needed in the zest to just use bottled juice. So that's what I will be doing. Here is my lime zest. I'm just going to cut my lime in half and juice the lime. That means I want to squeeze this. And you'll notice with half of a lime, you're not getting that much juice. So if I were to totally squeeze limes, I would be doing many limes to get a half cup. Because one lime did not even do a fourth of a cup, it did 1 ounce, which is an eighth of a cup. So I'm just going to fill this the rest of the way up to a half a cup because that is what I need. And that is much faster than trying to squeeze this many lines. I do like using this. I'm not throwing away lime juice. We're not ready to make the rest of the lime falling. In this large bowl, I'm going to put my 38 ounce packages of cream cheese. To that, I'm going to add my one cup of sugar, my one tablespoon of corn starch and my lime zest. And we want to mix this together until it's smooth and. I want to start with it on the lower spe til we get all of that sugar mixed in. Cora I'm going to just speed it up a little bit. And I want to scrape down the bowl and add my lime juice. We're now going to get it to become a lot thinner. And we're just doing that until it's combined. Screak that down some more. Now we want to add the eggs. One, two, three. We want to mix this just until it's all combined. F. Let me scrape that down. And there we have our cheesecake feeling ready to go in the pan. 4. 04 Baking and Cooling: We are ready to bake our cheesecake. We need to first get our pan ready because we're going to be cooking it in a water bath. I'm taking a piece of aluminum foil and I'm putting the cake on the aluminum foil and bringing that foil up the sides. This is to help prevent the water from getting into our cheesecake. With that done, we now want to our filling into the pan. We want to now put this in the oven. Before we put it in the oven, we got to get the other pan in there that's going to hold the water. As you can see, the rack is in the middle position. I am going to pull it out, and I've already put the cheesecake on the pan. You're going to put that down right there, and then I'm going to pour water into the pan. I like doing it this way because then I know I'm not going to get too much water in there or not enough water. Because the cheesecake has already been has already accounted for the displacement of water. And I want it to be about half an inch to an inch of water. We're now going to close carefully because we have water. Our pa. And we're going to set the oven for 55 minutes. We will be back to check our cheesecake in about an hour, 55 minutes when the timer goes off. Our timer is about ready to go off. Let's take a look at our cheesecake. There's our timer. Let's open this up, and we want to pull it out just at I'm looking at it's really jiggly. So I'm going to give it another 5 minutes. We'll be back in 5 minutes to check it again. We wanted to jiggle a little bit, but we don't want it to jiggle as much as it was. Our time is again about ready to go off. So let's look at our cheesecake again. There is our time. Let's pull this out a little bit. It's still a little bit more jibe than I want. I'm going to give it that last 5 minutes, which will be the 65. Every oven cooks just a little bit different. So you really do want to check it at 55, and if it's not done then 60, and if it's not done then 65. I think as 65, it will be done, so we will be back at 65 minutes to see if it's done. Our time is about ready to go off again. So let's look at our cheesecake. There's the. Okay. It just jiggles a little bit. So we're going to go ahead and turn the heat off, and we're going to let it sit in the oven with the oven propped open like that for about an hour. So we'll be back in about an hour to show you what we do after it has sat in the oven. We want the oven to cool down, and we want the cheesecake to slowly cool down so that we hopefully will not get a crack. It's also going to, while the oven has heat in it, finish cooking the rest of the way. Our cheesecake has been cooling in the oven actually a little over an hour, so we're ready to take it out of the oven now. I just want to lift this out of the oven. I also lifted it out of the aluminum foil. I'm now going to just cover this with a plastic because I want to make sure that it stays fresh, and we're going to put this in the fridge overnight, and then tomorrow we'll be ready to put the whip topping on it and the candied lines. 5. 05 Stabilized Whipped Topping: We are ready to make our stabilized lime whipped topping. It's a lot like cool whip. The first thing we need to do we do on the stove. In this pan, I'm going to dump one quarter cup water and one tablespoon of gelatin. We're going to let this just sit for two to 3 minutes. While that's sitting, I'm going to get the lime ready. In this bowl, I want to zest my lime. And I'm just using this really fine grader and I'm going to grade the line. I only want to get the green part of the line. I do not want to go into the white because that part is very bitter. I just keep going til I have most of the lime peeling, grated off of the line. Then I'm going to when I'm done, just scrape on the underneath side, whatever is on there. There is my limes es. Now I'm going to cut my lime in half so that I can squeeze it to get the lime juice. I need for teaspoons. Hopefully, I can get that out of one line. If not, you might just want to use whatever you do get out of the one line. Four teaspoons is just a little bit over a tablespoon. So there is how much lime I got from it. I'll probably just use whatever is there and not worry about measuring it. Our gelatin has been sitting for a couple of minutes, so let's go ahead and look at it. You can see the gelatin gone solid. So we're going to turn the heat on. To medium low, and we're just going to stir it until that gelatin dissolves. We're not trying to bring it to a boil. We just want it to dissolve, and that's not going to take a whole lot. Just like that, you can see it has dissolved. We now turn off the heat, and we're going to let this cool while we work on some more of our whip topping. I have another small bowl here, and I'm going to add my half teaspoon of cream of tartar. To that, it says a tablespoon. I'm not worried about the exact amount. I just want to pour just a little bit in there so that I can mix up that cream of tartar. Once I get it completely mixed up, We'll be ready to move on to the next step. We have our stand mixer here, and we have the whisk attachment. In the bowl. We're going to add that whip topping with the cream of tartar that we mixed up, and we're also going to add the rest of the whip whipping cream and three tablespoons of sugar. I want to take this and attach it, but put it like that so that it's touching the bottom. And now I'm going to put it on a low speed. This way, it's making contact with the whip topping so that it can whip air into it. And we're going to turn it up to medium speed, and we're going to beat it for about 2 minutes. When I start seeing a little bit of volume come, I'm going to turn it off to firmly attach the risk attaching back on. I'm going to turn this off for just a minute so that I can now firmly attach that. And we have it on the median speed and we want to whip it till it starts to thicken up. You can see it's starting to thicken up. Now I'm going to pour in my gelatin mixture. I'm also going to add my vanilla, my lines, and my lime juice. Now we just want this to thicken up. L et me stop it for a minute. You can see that stickinged up quite nicely. Here we have our whip topping. 6. 06 Candied Limes: We are ready to make the candied lines. We want to start by slicing our lines. Now, I want to slice these very thin. I'm going to make the first one thicker because I'm not going to use that end. And then I want to do these very thin. As thin as I can. I don't know if I made that as thin as I wanted it. We'll just keep going. I'm also going to cut each one in half, because when I put them on the cheesecake, I want them to be line halfs. Let's go ahead and make them halfs. Think that's going to be plenty. We're ready to start canning our limes. That is going to be done on the stove. In this pan. We want to put one cup of water and one cup sugar. And we want to stir this. While heating it on medium heat until it's completely you don't see any sugar, until the sugar is completely dissolved into the water. We're not trying to bring it to a boil yet. We're just trying to dissolve the sugar. You can see That's looking pretty clear. The sugar is pretty much dissolved. I'm going to quit stirring up for now, and we're going to place our limes in our pan, and we want them in a single layer as much as we can get it that way. We just keep putting them in the pan. We now want to bring this mixture to a boil. You can see along the edges, it's starting to boil, but we want the whole thing to boil. Really all I'm doing right now is where I see it overlapping and I'm trying to overlap it. Once it comes to a boil, which it's almost there, because we want the whole thing boiling, not just that part there. You can see it's boiling quite good there. I'm not really boiling over here. I'm not sure why. L et's turn our pan, see if that makes a difference. We're starting to get the boil. We're now going to turn the heat down to a kind of a medium lose that we'll just do that soft boil, and we're going to cook this for about a half an hour. So I want to set my time on for half an hour, and we'll let this simmer and we'll be back in half an hour to see how our candied limes are going. Our limes have been cooking in this sugar water for about for a little over half an hour. That should give enough sugar into our limes. We're ready now to take the limes out of the sugar water. Because the limes are very warm, I want to use these tongues to put them onto our cooling rack. I've put wax paper underneath the cooling rack because I know that some liquid is going to fall. The tongs weren't working as well as I thought they would. I'm using this little spatula instead because with this, I can get underneath, as you can see there, my limes and bring them up and then spread them on the cooling rack. We do want to make sure on the cooling rack that they're not overlapping each other at all. And now that I have all the limes out, we're just going to let them completely cool and let the sugar completely crystallize on the lines. And I'm just quickly looking to make sure none are touching. If they are touching, I'm slowly moving them, so they're not touching. There you have your candied limes. 7. 07 Finishing Touches: We have all of our elements made. The cheesecake has sat in the fridge overnight. We're now ready to totally assemble and give it the finishing touches. Here is my cheesecake, and I'm just going to uncover it. And I do want to kind of run my knife around just to make sure that this is going to separate nicely. And now I'm going to take this part right here and open it. And remove that part from the cheesecake. Now, what I want to do is I'm going to put some whip topping on top and spread it around. I want this to be a very thin layer just enough to cover it. I have my whip topping on. Smooth it out. You can now see that's on. Now we're going to take the rest of the whip topping and put it in a bag. I want to cut a hole in my bag. I'm sticking this tip. It's like a round tip, but it has a design on the edge so that I have a little bit of design on my puffs of whip topping that I'm going to pipe out. You notice, comes right to the edge there. I'm going to scoop the whipping into that bag. And that's why I wanted a thin coat on it because I wanted to make sure I had enough whip topping for this next part. I'm taking this and just twisting the bag till I start seeing that whip topping come out. I'm just going to go around the edges and do little kisses. Now, what I want to do with these kisses is I want to stick my limes in. I'm going to go ahead and stick it. I've got to decide how I want it. I'm going to stick it so that it's coming like that. I'm going to start by doing every other one because I'm not sure how many limes I have. And this way, if I don't have enough, I still get the pretty, and if I have plenty when I get this part done, I can go back and fell in between. These lines, while they are edi, chances are people will just take them off and put them on their plate. But they do make a nice garnish. I still have over half of them left, so I'm going to go ahead and do each one. Now, I also have this crystallized lime, and I just want to sprinkle some on the top to help give it that lovely flavor. There we have our lime cheesecake. 8. 08 Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking this class. We had fun making our lime cheesecake. We first learned how to make the crust. Then we moved on to the feeling. We then baked our cheesecake in a water bath. After the cheesecake had baked, we let it sit in the oven for an hour as it cooled down. After that, we removed it from the oven, let it cool down the rest of the way, covered it, and put it in the fridge to set up overnight. We then moved on to making our stabilized whipped cream and our candied lines. With ol of them made and the cheesecake totally set up, we removed the cheesecake from the pan, and then we added the stabilized whipped cream by spreading on top and then adding dollops around the edges. We then put our limes into each dollop, and then sprinkle the top with a crystallized lime. I hope your cheesecake turned out the way you wanted it to. Your project for this class is to make this cheesecake. The recipe is in the project section. And make sure that when you're done, you post a picture of your cheesecake in our project section and tell us how it went. I look forward to hearing from you from my kitchen to your kitchen. Happy baking.