Day 7 already! It’s crazy how fast the time is flying!

I must admit Christmas Bake-off proves to be a challenging undertaking. Not only for the obvious reasons, like time that you have to find everyday to bake because this, even though not the easiest with 9 month old Elf crawling around, is a pleasure and something that I look forward to.  Simply, there is only this much sweets and cake you can eat! And yes, I send my husband (or rather he sends himself 😉 ) to work with a lunchbox full of baked goodies instead of healthy salads but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Especially that we both have this annoying ‘ability’ of eating with our eyes so I normally end up preparing a bit too much of everything.

If you had a chance to read few posts back,  you know that two days ago I was baking gingerbread cookies. We enjoyed them very much so I did not want to get rid of the ones that left untouched. I was thinking what I could do with slightly hardening cookies when quite accidentally I came across recipe for gingerbread cheesecake. Ingenious!

Cheesecake with Christmasy twist turned to be a great idea as it was something we had never tried before and  our taste buds welcomed it with real excitement. All in all, not only the gingerbread cookies were revived but also I found a recipe that would be safely saved for next year festivities.

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Original Recipe Gingerbread Cheesecake

Ingredients
cheese for cheesecake- 1 kg
gingerbread cookies- 200 g
sugar- 200 g
starch- 30 g
whipping cream (30%)- 200 g
eggs- 3 units
vanilla sugar- 1 spoon

Directions
1. In a large bowl mix together 1/4 of cheese, 1/3 of sugar and starch. Mix quite vigorously until all ingredients are well combined. If you are using electric mixer, mix at medium speed for about 3 minutes.
2. Add the rest of cheese, eggs, vanilla sugar and keep mixing for a minute. Next, pour the cream and carry on whisking until well incorporated.
3. Chop the gingerbread cookies into small pieces and add to the cheese mix. 
4. Transfer into round baking tin and bake for an hour in 175°C. (Place another tin filled with water under the shelf with your cake.)
5. Cool the cheesecake before serving. Tastes best when chilled. 

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The cake itself not only tastes good but looks incredibly tempting; moist and creamy cheese with a hint of all these spices without which gingerbread wouldn’t be the same, just yummy. Decoration-wise, this is very individual thing, as far as taste and aesthetics concerned. I decided to finish it off in a quite simplistic way and at the same time balance the sweetness of cheese with unsweetened cocoa. Quite unexpectedly it turned to create velvety mist around the top so that entire cake looks like a light, chocolatey cloud.

I have already made it clear that I enjoyed that cake, but am I being overly complimenting? Let’s have a look at our ‘Yummy Chart” (it looks like gingerbread cheesecake is the winner of the first week!)