On Sunny Days and Cheesecake

Yay for sunshine and crisp spring air! Today I felt like I could walk all day (and by all day I mean two hours). It's also the Monday of Easter-- which means that Lent ends in just a few days! And so many good things come with Easter: chocolate eggs (oh, wait), freshly baked bread (can't do that either), yummy chocolate croissants (hmm)...

Well, I refuse to be disheartened because I present to you a super yummy cheesecake recipe adapted from the Sorrento site. It was a funny story with this cheesecake. I really wanted to bake a sweet dessert, because after a week of being too busy to cook anything (and thus living off greek yogurt and turkey slices), I felt like if I didn't have something decadent I would surely break this diet in an awful crumbling of will--and you know the thing with willpower is that once it breaks, it will always remember that it broke. It's a dangerous thing to allow your will to break, and the consequences of it aren't just temporary.

So I tried the best Dukan cheesecake recipe I could find--which involved beating up egg whites and messing around with gelatin. But to be honest I'm a huge fusspot, I do hate gelatin in cheesecake (it gives the cake a kind of gross feel (unless masterfully done), and the cake tasted very fake besides, and I very honestly could not force myself to eat more than a slice. It was awful! But I sat down, very annoyed at wasting all that cheese and time, and decided that if there wasn't a good Dukan recipe to be found then I just ought to make my own. So I looked in my fridge and realized that I didn't have a whole ton of groceries, and tried to find a cheesecake recipe with only 3 eggs, less than 9 oz of cream cheese, and so forth--well after some time searching I found the Sorrento recipe, adapted it, and here it is!

Dukan Friendly Cheesecake (770 cal)

8oz tub fat-free cream cheese
15oz tub fat-free ricotta cheese
3 eggs
2/3 cup artificial baking sugar (I use Ideal, use whatever; the recipe said 1 1/3 cups but artificial sweeteners do have this too-sweet taste)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanille
1 tsp imitation butter

Now the very important thing with cheesecakes is to make sure everything is at room temperature-- very important!

Preheat oven 325 F
1. Mix the cream cheese with the sugar until the sugar is fully mixed in, cream cheese is fluffy
2. Add ricotta, mix until just incorporated (don't overmix with these cakes!)
3. Add eggs one by one, mixing until just incorporated
4. Add flavorings
5. Pour into a 9 (or 8) inch cake pan, greased the Dukan way (oil, wiped off)
6. Place pan inside a bigger baking pan, put in oven and pour water into the bigger baking pan, creating a water bath
7. Bake 50 min until cheesecake isn't wet but still wobbly in the center; switch off oven but leave the cake inside for 30 minutes or so so the temperature lowers slowly--and you don't suddenly have a deflated cake!
8. Take the cake out and let cool, then clingwrap and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!
P.S: Yes, having run out of clingwrap I had to make use of aluminum foil!