Strawberry Ripple Cheesecake - Weekly Bake Off and Clandestine Cake Club

I'm having trouble not sitting down and eating this right now!

This week's Weekly Bake Off recipe was the American Chocolate Ripple Cheesecake, which I actually made a couple of months ago for my first Clandestine Cake Club outing. It was absolutely gorgeous and I felt it ticked all the boxes of my cheesecake requirements - tangy, sweet and sticky. I did feel that there was too little biscuit for the base, and so doubled the amount - I also used half ginger biscuits, half digestive for a nice tangy base.

Now coincidentally this week I have another Clandestine Cake Club event. I also have a Herman to bake (another post tomorrow!), and so I decided that rather than making 3 cakes, I'd recycle the recipe for the American Ripple cheesecake, but modify it for the CCC theme - Favourite Tipple, using some homemade strawberry jam and strawberry vodka.

Last year I really got into making jams and the Soup kitchen saw strawberry, bramble and port, spiced plum and bilberry jams, and an assortment of jellies (crab apple and chilli is my favourite). I made the strawberry jam using a very similar recipe to the bramble and port jelly - (just without the port!). The strawberry vodka was made by soaking strawberries in a bottle of vodka with a cup of sugar. After about a month, the vodka was drained off the strawberries and passed through a filter into a clean bottle.

And now onto the cheesecake - I've changed the recipe quite a bit, so will be listing the ingredients and method in a bit more detail than I normally do for the Weekly Bake Off posts.

Ingredients

Base
200g digestive biscuits
100g melted butter

Filling :
600g cream cheese
100g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 large eggs
100g strawberry jam
50ml strawberry vodka

Topping :
150g strawberry jam
100ml strawberry vodka

Method

Grease a sprung tin (mine is a 23cm tin)

Crush the biscuits and mix with the melted butter. Layer the biscuits on the bottom of the tin and press down. Put in the fridge while preparing the filling to allow to set.

Beat the cream cheese and caster sugar together, then mix in the vanilla essence and eggs.
Spoon half the mixture onto the biscuit base in big dollops.
Puree the strawberry jam and vodka together in a blender (my jam had great big chunks of fruit in it so this was really important!)
Mix the jammy mix into the remaining filling, then pour this onto the rest of the filling. Swirl together.
Bake in a preheated oven at 160ºC for about 30 minutes (you should be able to see the edges pulling away from the sides of the tin slightly).
Cool completely.
Blend together the topping ingredients - not as much as the filling - it's nice to keep some chunks of strawberries in the topping.
Pour the topping over the cheesecake, cover the tin with clingfilm and refigerate until ready for serving.
Release the sides of the tin, transfer off the base and onto a plate, and serve.
Enjoy!