May 5, 2018

Passionfruit and Raspberry Cheesecake

Name: Passionfruit and Raspberry Cheesecake
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 50 min
Total time: 75 min
Yield: 10 people
Ingredients: 25 Speculoos Cookies (or 150 grams); 1/3 cup melted Unsalted Butter (or 70 grams); 2 1/4 cups Cream Cheese (or 500 grams); 1/4 cup Full Fat Milk; 2 Eggs (at room temperature); 1/3 cup Brown Sugar (or 70 grams); 5 Fresh Passionfruits; 5 tbsp. Plain Flour (or 40 grams); 1/2 cup Raspberries

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When you think of the ultimate crowd pleasing dessert, Cheesecake often comes to mind. But If you want to please AND wow your family and party guests, this easy Raspberry Passion Fruit Cheesecake with Speculoos Crust recipe is for you!

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Cheesecakes were never one of my go-to dessert growing up. You don’t typically find cheesecakes in traditional French bakeries, and the only recipe I was accustomed to was my grandma’s Eastern-European style baked cheesecake. But this was until I spent a year in the US in 2008 and was brought to “The Cheesecake Factory“. I’ll stop you right there – their cheesecakes were way too heavy and sweet for my taste and this recipe will be nothing like theirs. But that year abroad introduced me to the light, creamy, flavourful cheesecakes!

I have shared a recipe for a Raw, Vegan Lime and Blueberry Cheesecake before and I absolutely love Raw Cheesecakes! But this time, I made a non-vegan Cheesecake and used real Cream Cheese.

Even though Cheesecakes aren’t something I often make, I decided to work on a recipe after finding Speculoos biscuits in Melbourne. If you are wondering what the hell is a Speculoos, it is also known as “Biscoff” in many parts of the world. It is a traditional Belgian / Dutch spiced cookie that I grew up with. When you order a coffee at a cafe in Brussels, it will most likely be served with a Speculoos cookie. It is also commonly used to make cheesecake crusts, quite similarly to a Graham Cracker. But the spices used in Speculoos – mainly cinnamon – really bring an intense and interesting flavour that you cannot find anywhere else!
I highly recommend trying to find the Speculoos Cookies for this recipe (and also because they are simply delicious) or you can get them here. Instead, you can also use Gingerbread Cookies or Graham Crackers. Not the same, though!

I had to experiment a bit with it to find the perfect Speculoos Crust recipe. This involved a few “not good enough for the blog but good enough for my belly” trials. Hard life, right!?
After working out the crust recipe, I decided to flavour the classic Cheesecake batter with Passionfruit. I absolutely love Passionfruit; it’s sweet and sour at the same time, and the seeds brings such a nice crunch! I thought it would be a really fun way to naturally bring texture to the Cheesecake batter. And because it seems that I cannot focus on one, simple recipe, I chose to make a Raspberry Swirl to decorate the cake. I find that Passion Fruit and Raspberry work really well together as they are both relatively tangy and crunchy!

For this Passionfruit and Raspberry Cheesecake recipe, you will need a classic Cheesecake Tin. I always recommend using a Tin with Removable Edges instead of a traditional cake tin, as I explained in my Peach and Almond Olive Oil Cake recipe.
The tin I used was quite large so the Cheesecake turned out relatively thin, but you can simply use a smaller Cheesecake Tin to create a higher cake. Only keep in mind that the cake will probably need to bake for longer if higher!

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