Banana-Cherry Cheesecake

The UK/US version of cheesecake is another cake which is quite new to the Slovak cuisine and it is a new “cool” thing to do/bake. There are a lot of replacements and shorcuts being made (usually due to the difficulties getting the "right" ingredients) when baking this cake. However, I wanted to try a cheesecake without any such shortcuts and to get as close to the original as possible. So I read and read and read in order to get all tips and details how to make a decent cheesecake and this is what I made. I do not know how my cheesecake would be rated by a professional cheesecake baker but I freakin’ loved it found its taste rather pleasant and satisfactory. 

As I have been going through my banana obsession period, I have decided to choose the recipe with (surprisingly) banana in it. I have combined it with cherries which I personally picked from our cherry tree :) and I think it was a good cobination to try.

I just couldn't resist.

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We will need (for the 27 cm / approx. 10.6 inch springform pan):

300 g biscuits (3 cups)

100 g soft butter (8 tablespoons)

1 tablespoon oats*

1 tablespoon cacao*

1 tablespoon brown sugar*

700 g cream cheese (look for a cream cheese with approx. a fat content of around 33% and a moisture content of 55%; 23 oz)

4-5 very ripe bananas

6 eggs

60 ml lemon juice (4 tablespoons)

150 g soft light brown sugar (5/6 cup)

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approx. 300 g (ideally fresh and definitely without pits) cherries

27 cm / approx. 10.6 inch springform pan

Recept v slovenčine

TIP: It is darn hard to wrap the 27 cm springform pan in an aluminum foil so that you have a water-tight covering. Thus, if this is your preferred way of cheesecake-baking, I would recommend using a 23 cm / 9 inch springform pan and to reduce the amount of above state ingredients (save for the one with a “star” next to them by 1/3 – trust me, the ingredients above form a really big amount of batter.

METHOD:

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C/340°F. Grease your springform pan. I would also recommend lining the bottom  of the pan with a parchment paper in order to protect your pan from cuts when cutting the cheesecake.

2. Process the biscuits until they are like crumbs; add sugar, oats, cacao and soft butter to crumbs and combine. Press the batter to the pan and pat it with your hands/bottom of a glass. Bake for 10 minutes. Rinse and dry cherries, get rid of pits.

3. Mash bananas until smooth and add lemon juice to it.

4. Gently mix the cream cheese at a lowest speed. Add sugar and later, one by one, gently beat in the eggs. At the end, add the bananas.

TIP: There are a lot of advices on the issue of how to prevent cheesecake from sinking when cooling. Well, the cheesecake is not suppose to rise in the first place (well, only a slightly tiny little bit). That’s why you have to use the lowest speed when mixing ingredients together in order to minimize the amount of air being mixed in.

5. Pour the cheese batter on the pre-baked crust. (Gently) tap the form so that the air bubbles (if any) are released). 

6. Put the cherries on the top. And now, this is the moment when a miracle happened. I was persuaded (and afraid) that due to the batter being very liquid-y, the cherries would definitely sink in. Well, they didn’t (or it is more precise to say that only 20% of the cherries decided to go scuba-diving) and as you can see they stayed on the top.

7. Put the pan (and obviosly cheesecake) in the oven and now, we have several options how to bake it: we may either (i) wrap the sprinform pan in the aluminum foil in order to prevent any water leakage (if this is our choice, I would recommend doing this in the beginning in step 1), and put the springform pan with the cheesecake into another pan, into which we will pour boiling water so that the water reaches halfway up the side of the springform apn with the cheesecake, or (ii) we may put the springform pan with the cheesecake in the oven and we will place yet another pan with boiling water on the bottom of the oven, or (iii) we may use another pan with a wire rack, place the springform pan on the wire rack and pour the boiling water into the pan.

8. Bake at 170°C/340°F for 1 hour and 10 min. Do not open the oven and peek in during baking. After an hour, check the cheesecake. The top should be baked/set but at the same time, the centre should be a little bit “giggly”. After the cheesecake is baked, take it out of the oven and let it cool for 5 minutes.

TIP: In order to prevent your cheesecake from cracking, after it has been cooling for 5 minutes, run a thin knife along the edges, pressing the knife against the wall of the pan to loosen the top (when cooling, the cheesecake shrinks a little bit and any its edge “glued” to the pan could lead to the cracking).

9. We continue with cooling at a room temperature (ideally on a wire rack). Put the cooled cheesecake into the fridge overnight. Do not try to remove the springform pan before the cheesecake is completely (super-duper) chilled. Take out from the fridge approx. 30 min. before serving.

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The inspiration for this recipe (as it is really often in my case) was a great Nigella Lawson.

I really loved the twist provided by the light muscovado sugar. It kinda added yet another dimension to the taste. The cheesecake was “light” and creamy yet dense/dark – probably also due to the bananas.