Key Lime Cheesecake

Cooking school was a bust last weekend, all that enthusiasm evaporated on Saturday and Sunday. Which is fine they are only 9 and 11 years old. I'm just happy that they might be interested in the future.

key lime cheesecake
Originally uploaded by Teckelcar

Meanwhile I had picked up a bag of Key Limes at the store and I needed to do something with them. Jake noticed them yesterday and hopefully said "cheesecake?" I was thinking of a pie, but cheesecake sounded like a good idea to me. Conveniently the the bag of limes had a small laminated slip of paper nestled among the fruit with two recipes, one for Key Lime pie and the other for Key Lime Cheesecake. The cheesecake seemed to be along the same lines of what I normally bake so I decided to give it a shot.

Key Lime Cheesecake from C-Brand Tropicals

Crust:
1 1/2 cups fine graham cracker crumbs
2 tbl sugar
1/2 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled*

Stir together the graham cracker crumbs and sugar. Add the butter and pat on the bottom and sides of buttered 9-inch springform pan.** Bake crust for 8 minutes at 375.

Filling:
20 ounces packaged cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
3 tbl flour
3 eggs
3/4 cup Key Lime juice***
1 tsp vanilla

Beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Beat in the sour cream, flour, eggs (one at a time) the Key Lime juice, and the vanilla. Pour filling over the crust. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes. reduce the temperature to 250 and bake 50-55 minutes more or until the center is barely set.****

*I don't know why it needs to be cooled, I didn't worry about that part.
**Buttered? I just read that part now, obviously I skipped it. I did, however, line the bottom with parchment paper. This makes it super easy to get the bottom of the springform pan off of the cake. That is my SOP.
***Which worked out to be the entire 1 lb bag or about 20 Key Limes (I lost count after a while, they are tiny little buggers and a pain to juice).
****I then broiled it a bit to get the nice brown spots on top, I think that makes it look nicer.

The recipe doesn't mention this, but... after the cake cooled a bit I stuck it in the fridge for a 6+ hours. Longer would have been better. The cheesecake is very good. There is a strong snap of flavor from the limes and the texture is silky smooth. It wasn't quite as dense as I would have liked, but a little aging in the fridge might fix that. This one is definitely a keeper.