Okay, back on familiar ground with this one.  I am quite partial to baking and cheesecake, Corsican or otherwise, is high on my list of favourite desserts.  This one, from Gabriel Gaté and the Taste le Tour team at SBS is dead easy to make and deliciously decadent to eat…second slice anyone?

Ingredients

• 500 g (1 lb 2 oz) fresh ricotta (recipe calls for a local brocciu cheese or ewe’s milk ricotta but regular ricotta is an easily accessible substitute)
• 200 g (7 oz) caster sugar
• 1 lemon, finely zested
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tbsp alcohol of your choice (I used Cointreau – yum)
• 5 eggs (60 g each)
• butter for greasing
• Pure icing sugar to dust
• Fresh berries to serve

Method

First of all you need to drain the excess liquid off the ricotta.  Do this by wrapping the ricotta firmly in a piece of food grade muslin (available from kitchen ware shops or fabric stores like Spotlight) and leaving in a colander suspended over a bowl (to catch the drips) for an hour or so.  Leave it in the fridge while it drains.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius (170 fan forced) and grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin.  Place the ricotta, 50gms of the sugar and the lemon zest in a bowl and mix with an electric (or stand) mixer until smooth. Add alcohol and lemon juice and mix until blended.

Then place the eggs and remaining sugar in a second bowl and mix with an electric mixer on high-speed for 5 minutes or so or until the mixture becomes pale, thick and creamy.

Thick, creamy, pale egg and sugar mixture

Using a hand whisk, gently add 1/3 of the ricotta mixture to the eggs and whisk to combine. Repeat until all the ricotta is combined with the eggs.  You don’t have to fuss with it too much, just be gentle and try not to over whisk.  The end result should look thick, creamy and luscious, like this…

Pour the mixture into the lined tin.  At this point I realised that I had not bought any fresh raspberries and only had frozen on hand, so I decided to add these on top of the batter and bake them into the cheesecake. A slight variation, but one that worked well I think.

Bake the cheesecake for about 45 minutes until golden around the edges.  Cheesecake will be a bit wobbly in the centre and deflate a bit as it cools so leave it in its tin while it cools down.  No need to panic though, that’s what it is supposed to do (although mine hadn’t by the time I took the photos – too many eager eaters waiting to taste!

And that is it!  Dust with pure icing sugar and slice to serve…