proper dessert alert: the chubby cheesecake

Chubby cheesecake! Yes that’s right. I’ve been away and/or revising lately but here’s a cracking recipe to make up for it. It’s delicious and it’s made with decent ingredients and you’re not going to make it, taste it, hoy it in the bin and then drown yourself in eight full tubs of Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s ice-cream until your significant other finds you dead with a chocolate fish stuck up your nostril and marshmallow in your moustache. Yes, your moustache.

I’ve never considered SW desserts essential. They’re crude and unspeakably plain. You may remember we tried to make the ‘delicious’ half-syn roulade a couple of years ago, with the end result being something I wouldn’t use to wipe my cat’s arse with. There seems to be a fundamental belief that by stirring a sack of sweetener into a yoghurt you’ve suddenly created tiramisu that would make Jesus weep. It just doesn’t work.

Here’s the thing. You’re never going to get a diet dessert that doesn’t taste like arse unless it’s fruit. You’re going to have to spend some syns to get something halfway between ‘full diet’ and ‘full fat’. Fat-light, if you will. With this in mind, we took our favourite dessert – the cheesecake – and researched ways to make it lighter without using sweetener and tears. Cheesecake is normally made with buttery biscuits on the bottom. Delicious, buttery biscuits. The filling is usually full fat cream cheese and sugar. The end result is perfection. So how to cut that down? Bake it. A decent, stodgy, slightly wibbly-wobbly cheesecake with a crunchy bottom and lots of taste. Yep, it has syns, but not that many per portion – and we found that this actually serves well as a ‘breakfast’ cheesecake in the morning, so have a slice for breakfast.

Before we get to the recipe, though, why not have a quick gander at this flowchart to see if you’re ready?

Yes, it’s all so clear now! OK, let’s not fart about for a moment more. To the Chubby Cheesecake! We owe a debt of gratitude to rachelcooks.com for the original recipe which we’ve bastardised and made our own – hers is an excellent website if, like us, you’re looking for decent food as opposed to slop. We’re calling it chubby because, like Paul, it wobbles gently when you put your finger in it. This makes nine servings. Nine! 

to make a chubby cheesecake, you’ll need:

for the base

  • 160g of bog-standard oats (4 x HEB) (hence using this for breakfast!)
  • 25g of butter (gasp!) (9 syns)
  • 25g of sugar (brown makes it crunchy but white is fine) (5 syns) (nurse! NURSE!)
  • 1 tsp of cinnamon
  • 2 tablespoons of milk

for the filling

  • 600g of cottage cheese (fat free)
  • 200g of fat-free Greek style yoghurt (the thick stuff) (ooer missus) (slut)
  • two tablespoons of maple syrup (4 syns)
  • 3 large eggs
  • couple of drops of vanilla essence

for the swirly bit

  • tablespoon of honey (2 syns)
  • pinch more of cinnamon

BUT I DON’T LIKE COTTAGE CHEESE OMG I HATE YOU.

Shut up. You can’t taste it. It adds the creaminess without getting you blue-lighted to hospital with grey lips. You’ll barely be able to know it is there. But if you hate cottage cheese, you mustn’t feel like you need to leave us a comment telling us. We get that all the damn time. Substitute something else in. Quark. Extra-light Philadelphia. Cocaine. Whatever makes it worth for you.

You’re also going to need an eight-inch square deep cake tin. Something like this. Oh and a blender – we use our super-fancy Magimix but then we would. Have a look and tell me you wouldn’t want that in the kitchen. But listen, a bog-standard stick blender will do the job just as well.

Final point, if you make this with vanilla essence, it’ll be lovely. However, I’m not a fan of vanilla, so I used custard flavouring from Lakeland. It makes it taste like a dirty big egg custard. Feel free to mess with the flavours and make it exactly how you like. Christ, I’m going to have a nosebleed soon if I don’t get on with it.

to make a chubby cheesecake, you should:

  • preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line the cake tin with non-stick baking paper
  • mix together all the base ingredients with the melted butter and press it right down into the bottom of the tin – really push it down
  • into the oven it goes for a good fifteen minutes – you don’t want the base to burn but you do want it to crunch up a bit (it’ll soften again with the topping on, so this is a good way to stop it getting too mushy – and actually, it tastes lovely mushy too)
  • whilst that is baking, hoy all the filling ingredients into a food processor or a bowl and blend the buggery out of it – you want it smooth, mixed and lovely. We use lovely big farm eggs so it goes a golden yellow
  • out comes the cake tin, pour the filling over the top
  • get yourself a little sandwich bag and pour the honey and cinnamon into a corner of it – mush it together with your hands and then cut off a tiny bit of the corner, allowing you to drizzle it all over the top of the cheesecake
  • I’m not artistic so I just allowed it to drop all over the place
  • into the oven for a good forty minutes – you want it to stop being jiggly in the middle
  • take it out and allow to cool completely before cutting it up into nine bars
  • enjoy!

If you want to serve it like us, heat some raspberries up, lightly break them up and pour over the top. The cheesecake is stodgy enough to take the tartness of the fruit. This keeps well in the fridge in a sealed container and yes, does lovely for a bit of breakfast!

Want more dessert ideas other than this chubby cheesecake? Why not? Click the buttons and live!

breakfastsmallsnackssmall dessertsmallslowcookersmallovernight-oatstastersmall

J

Comments

comments

10 thoughts on “proper dessert alert: the chubby cheesecake

  1. Hi Chubby Cubs,
    Just join your group of followers so I am a newbie. I really enjoy reading your blog and definitely will start cooking with your recipes.
    I am a 69yrs old woman with English as my second language, so am still learning the new lingo everyday. I have questions and hope you don’t mind to help me… what are HEB & syns that appearing in the recipe, are they level of something like fat or sweet?
    I hope you don’t mind to let me know
    Cheers,
    Peingpen

    • Hey,
      I have no idea what the HEB is, but syns are a slimming world reference, like weight watchers have points.
      Hope that helps.
      X

    • HEB in Slimming world lingo is your Healthy Extra B (your fibre essentials) and HEA is , you guessed it, your Healthy Extra A (your calcium essentials) . As the chubby cubs explained once upon a time the A stops your ankles breaking when you rush to the toilet when your B starts to work (or something like that) 🤣🤣

  2. Just two weeks into slimming world and I was looking for something a little more…… tasty
    Two chubby cubs delivered and I have devoured your page and roared laughing.
    What a lift to the soul you have given.

    Count me In!

    Lisa

  3. Made my version of this today and it’s lovely. Didn’t make a base just the cheesecake and used a third of the ingredients, replacing the maple syrup with a tablespoon of Sukrin Gold. I put the mixture in three ramekin dishes and cooked them for 30 minutes. Served with sliced strawberries.
    Delicious. Thanks cubs.

  4. Lovely! I don’t follow slimming world but love to bake and make a lot of healthy recipes as my mam is following the diet/lifestyle/club/whateveryoucallit 😀 . I tweaked your recipe slightly and used two tablespoons of strawberry jam and about one and a half cups raisins as sweetener as the grapes wanted using and I also used strawberry onken yoghurt (no fat of course) and added a couple of broken up strawberries to make a strawberry flavoured cake, I subbed the butter and sugar for banana in the base too as I’ve made granola that way. I absolutely love reading your blog, you know it’s good when you’re sat on a bus journey laughing at your phone like a weirdo 😛 . please keep making more awesome posts, recipes and smiles!

  5. Love this like all of your posts / blog. Been going in circles trying to find how to post this via the FB page and given up…. Going to finally make the cheesecake (been planning it for 3 years and in the meanwhile my local Lakeland has closed! I think they’ve stopped doing the custard flavouring anyway). I’m gonna use vanilla extract as I’ve got that in but don’t want to miss out if you have updated version of recipe so is there anything else which you recommend other than the Lakeland ingredient? A dirty big egg custard sound sublime…

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