Light and Creamy Cheesecake Recipe

Hey I’m Gaby and today on CrispyBake’s Kitchen we’re making a delicious light and creamy cheesecake.
So let’s get started.

Crust Ingredients

1 ½ cups or 180 grams of graham cracker crumbs
2 tablespoons of granulated sugar
¼ cup or about 65 grams of unsalted butter
9-inch springform pan

Making the Crust

In a large bowl, add one and a half cups or 180 grams of graham cracker crumbs. You have a couple choices though. You could buy graham cracker crumbs, pre-crumbed. You could use 12 full sheets of graham crackers and crumble them yourself. This way you can get some bigger pieces for more texture or you could use an equal amount of your perfectly gooey chocolate chip cookies. Biscoff or speculose would also be delicious in this.
To my graham crackers, add two tablespoons of granulated sugar so give it a good mix.
Add a quarter cup or about 65 grams of unsalted butter. Pour that right in.
Work this together with a spoon or your clean fingers until it’s like a wet sandy mixture. You don’t want to have big clumps of butter and lots of dry nonsense. That’s not going to work.
With just a little mixing, you can see we have a beautiful like wet sandy mixture that’s perfect for our springform pan.
Grab a nine inch springform pan and transfer our cookie crumbs right inside.
Use your flat bottom measuring glass to create an even layer. Pop some over to the side and then press a little bit up the side probably about an inch or so so we have a partial side crust not all the way up. If your crust is really high it just makes it very crumbly and difficult when you have to cut into your cheesecake because it tends to collapse. When pressing, turn a bit too.

Once your crust is nice and compressed, pop it into the oven 350 for 15 minutes and you will smell when it’s ready.

Filling Ingredients

3 eight-ounce room temperature blocks of cream cheese
1 cup or 200 grams of granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of vanilla (10 ml)
3 eggs
½ cup of sour cream (120 grams)

Preparing the Cheesecake Filling

In the meantime, we’re going to get our filling together. It comes together so quickly and the key is to use room temperature ingredients.
Into the bowl of my stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, add three eight ounce room temperature blocks of cream cheese. If your cream cheese is cold it’s just not going to incorporate really well with the other much softer more liquidy ingredients and that’s going to lead to lumps which is going to lead to cracks and just like cheesecake that’s not how you want it to be. So warm it up in the microwave at half power until it is room temperature or even a little bit warm. Pop that into your bowl. If you want you could definitely make this in a big bowl with the hand mixer you’ll just be using a lower power because you don’t want to whip a lot of air into it.
You also want to clean your spatula off. This often collects things that haven’t been mixed really well which once that gets back into your mixture will lead to lumps, cracks, and just bits of like cream cheese or sour cream that aren’t mixed in with the sugar and vanilla.
Mix this on medium low for about a minute until it’s nice and smooth. We’re not going to use high power today because if we whip a lot of air into it those air bubbles will expand in the oven and lead to cracking which just doesn’t have the creamiest of consistencies. It changes the consistency as well as the look.
Once your cream cheese is nice and creamy, scrape the bowl down and get to adding in more delicious ingredients. The first cheesecakes were actually invented thousands of years ago. Very different from what we have now though. You’d have fresh cheese pounded with flour and honey and then grilled. Different consistency but throughout the centuries cheese and something sweet go hand in hand to make a delicious treat.
Into my bowl of cream cheese, add one cup or 200 grams of granulated sugar. Add this in while the mixer is running on low. A lot of people get so in their heads about cheesecake when it’s one of the simplest things to make. You just have to be careful of your oven temperature and the consistency of your ingredients as well as the speed of your mixer. Very basic things and once you have that you’re basically just whipping things pouring it and popping it into the oven. It’s much simpler than a regular cake.
For some contrast, add a quarter teaspoon of salt. A big pinch. There we go.
For some lovely depth of flavor, add two teaspoons of vanilla. It’s 10 ml. This looks amazing. The sugar does something magical. It makes it sweet but it also makes it really soft. Look at that. It almost looks like frosting at this point so you’ve totally changed the consistency as the sugar is melted into the cream cheese.
But the sugar is not gotten to the bottom of the bowl so give it a good scrape. Continue mixing on low after you scrape the bowl down.
Before adding sour cream, add three eggs in one at a time. This is up to you but I like to crack my eggs into a bowl. Give your eggs a mix just to break the yolks up really. If you want you can crack them into your bowl one at a time or add them in in thirds like I’m doing.
Back to medium low. Add in one egg. Allow this to incorporate and then scrape the bowl down and repeat that three times. You’ll be tempted to go on to high just to give it a good mix but just don’t do that. Nice and slow is the way to go.
This looks beautiful and glossy so now scrape the bowl down and you’ll see some thicker wider stuff coming up as you scrape. That’s the unmixed stuff with no egg in it and very importantly while you do that get some of this unmixed nonsense off of your paddle attachment.
Continue mixing and add the next egg in. Give that a scrape and now add the last egg in.
These eggs are all incorporated and my cake looks lovely so it’s time for our secret ingredient, that half cup of sour cream. This will lighten the cheesecake and give you a wonderful tang which complements the cream cheese and the sugar really nicely.
Mix this on medium low once more. Let this mix for a minute or two on low to medium low and once it is silky smooth give it a final check with your spatula and it’s ready to pour. It’s that easy. This type of cheesecake is based on cream cheese and cream cheese was invented in New York fairly recently so cheesecake as we know it really comes from the 1930s, spread out from New York and got tons of variations afterwards. There are different kinds like Bask cheesecake which predate that but that’s a different story. This looks lovely. Come take a look. You can see we have a uniform mixture, almost no lumps. Beautiful, you can see through the batter.

Baking and Finishing

Pour your batter into your cooled crust. My cake is ready to go into the oven 350 for 15 minutes then reduced to 300 and bake for another half hour to 35 minutes or until the center wobbles slightly. If you’re really paranoid about cracks or having like an oven that just is not on your side when it comes to cheesecakes, fill a 9 inch or 9 by 13 inch pan halfway full with really hot water and place that on the bottom rack of your oven and cook the cheesecake on the middle rack. This will steam up and give you a little bit of extra insurance which I’ll be using today but it’s optional.

Once your cake has that slight wobble in the center, close the door and turn your oven off. Leave the cheesecake in there for an hour so it cools slowly. If you take it right out the cheesecake is going to crack and you’ll be a little bit disappointed. After an hour, take it onto the countertop and let it cool to room temperature for about another hour. Then chill in your fridge for six hours or up to three days. You want the cheesecake to set so it doesn’t fall apart.

Let’s get it out of the spring form pan and get the top decorated. By the way, I treated myself and upgraded from my grocery store one to a fancy Nordicware waterproof one. So this one can go into a water bath without any water seeping in. You don’t have to cover it in tin foil anymore. Now with confidence slide it onto your cake plate. Can we take a moment to notice the beautiful unblemished unburnt perfect top of this cheesecake? This is ready for a cut but you have so many choices. You could enjoy this plane. I’m going to top this with a dollop of whipped cream and some fresh berries. For an extra rich finish, consider an easy homemade chocolate fudge sauce instead. The way that dissolves on your palate. It just gives you this shock of delicious flavor. Oh my gosh.

This cheesecake will keep up to four days in your fridge but this is the perfect dessert to make ahead and freeze. You can freeze the whole cheesecake or leftover slices, just wrap them really well in multiple sheets of plastic wrap, pop them into the freezer for up to three months, then just defrost overnight in your fridge. You are going to be so happy when you have a whole cake on demand with very little notice.

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