Strawberry Orange Cheesecake

Well, that was a quick rush of summer. The last couple of weeks, it was relatively warm here in Denmark so one could actually speak of summer. Unfortunately, that’s over now and we’re back to the old grey and rainy weather… Yay! Luckily, you can easily bring summer into your kitchen by preparing this lovely strawberry cheesecake I made for a friend who was visiting me.

I love strawberries in a cake, and after a quick online search I found a recipe for a typical Danish strawberry cake (don’t worry, I’ll post it some day) and on brigitte.de, I found this cheesecake. It looked really impressive on the pictures, especially with the marble pattern on top. Yet, it is really easy to prepare (as is any cheesecake), so just the perfect recipe for me, I thought 🙂 It turned out that the taste of the cake is even better than the look! Usually, I am not the biggest cheesecake fan, as I think the cream cheese is just too heavy… However with the fresh strawberries, it tasted really light and juicy! Combined with the crunchy crust of almonds and chocolate… hmmm, this might be my favorite cake posted here yet!

Ingredients for one 20 cm cake ring:

For the base:		For the topping:
50 g almonds		500 g strawberries
100 g biscuits		6 sheets gelatin
70 g butter		1 organic orange
70 g dark chocolate		400 g cream cheese
baking parchment		100 g sugar
		150 g whipping cream

Hash the almonds and crunch up the biscuits. Melt the butter in a saucepan, take the pan off the heat and stir under the almonds and the biscuit flour. Grate the chocolate and carefully fold in the batter. Spread some baking parchment on a cake plate, adjust the cake ring to 20 cm diameter and place it on the baking parchment. Transfer the chocolate biscuit batter to the baking parchment. Use a spoon to crimp it to a solid base. Put it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes while you prepare the topping.

Wash and clean the strawberries and remove the green. Take 3/4 aside and leave them as a whole. Blend the remaining quarter of the strawberries, transfer to a small bowl and set aside. Soak the gelatin sheets in cold water. In the meantime wash the orange under hot water, grate the zest and press the juice into a sauce pan. Mix cream cheese, sugar and half of the orange zest together in a bowl.

Heat up the orange juice. Squeeze the gelatin sheets and resolve them slowly in the warm orange juice. Mix 1-2 tbsp of the orange gelatin mixture with the strawberry puree and set aside. Mix 1-2 tbsp of the cream cheese mixture with the remaining gelatin orange mixture. Transfer the mixture to the bowl with the cream cheese and whisk under thoroughly. Whip the whipping cream until stiff and gently fold under the cheese mousse.

Take the cake base out of the fridge and place the whole strawberries on it upside down, i.e. such that the tips are pointing upwards. Transfer the cheese mousse to the cake ring and spread it thoroughly between the strawberries using a spoon. Put the strawberry puree on top of the cheese cake and use a spoon handle to stir lightly to get a marbled look. Let the cake rest in the fridge for at least 4 hours, or over night. After carefully removing the cake ring, decorate the cake with the remaining orange zest.