Make your own Cheese-Cheesecake

Thats right, you can make your own cheese, just like Alex James from Blur or ....erm....OK I don't know anyone else who makes cheese. Yes I do - me!

I learnt this technique on my recent visit to Yeo Valley (you can read more about that here). It rather appealed because:

1) I could teach my children about cheese

2) the end result is cheesecake

Making the cheese

So how do you do it? First you need some yogurt; a big tub of lovely Yeo Valley yogurt in the flavour of your choice. This means that your resulting cheese will be flavoured; raspberry & passionfruit cheese, lemon curd cheese, blackcurrant & elderflower cheese, the choice is huge.

Now gather together a sieve, a clean J-cloth, a bowl big enough to rest the sieve in and some clingfilm. Place the sieve in the bowl, the J-cloth in the sieve and the yogurt in the J-cloth. Cover with cling and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours.

When your cheese is nearly ready mix 50g of melted unsalted butter with 140g of crushed biscuits. I used digestives, but I bet that ginger biscuits would go brilliantly - especially with the lemon curd yogurt. Press this down into a springform tin, or like I did; a small quiche dish, or as suggested on the Yeo Valley website; some small jam jars (you can omit the butter if you are doing it like this). Chill to set.

You can see the whey in the bottom of the bowl

After 24 hours the whey will have dripped into the bowl and the curds remain in the J-cloth. The curds can now be made into the cheesecake topping. Mix the curds with a 227ml pot of Yeo Valley double cream, 2 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar and, if using a natural yogurt 2 drops of vanilla essence. This is really easy, you don't need to get out the mixer.

The curds (in raspberry and passionfruit flavour)

Spoon the topping mixture on top of the biscuit base and decorate as desired. You could use Yeo Valley fruit compotes, or fresh fruit. I made a raspberry and passionfruit cheesecake, which I left plain, but if raspberries had been in season I would have decorated it.

The Cheesecake in the brief moment before it was eaten

A word of warning, it will be gone in a flash and my husband has started looking up the different flavours online to put in requests.

This recipe was reproduced with kind permission of Yeo Valley. If you fancy seeing more delicious recipes there are loads on the Yeo Valley website.