Vanilla cheesecake with Raspberry Sauce

I finally tried making a cheesecake myself! I have always wanted to. And it was so much fun and so tasty, I made two within a couple of weeks. One was for a friend’s birthday and the other one just because. 🙂

I have just experimented with one plain vanilla flavor until now. I never really made a sauce to go with it. But just as I was starting to write this post and looking at the picture of the cakes that I made, I realized a nice sauce would go really well this cheesecake. Really, any flavor of sauce would go really well with vanilla, be it chocolate, strawberry or raspberry. But I personally like raspberries and hence they are going to feature in this post today. Well actually, I like strawberries and chocolate too….anyhow, let’s begin.

Things you will need:

A springform cake pan. This is very very handy when making a cheesecake because you can just unclasp the pan and remove it from the top. The base still remains as a support for the cheesecake. Imagine how messy it would be to just try ad invert a cheesecake into a pan like we do for normal cakes, NO! So ya, springform cake pan. I used a 9″ pan with this recipe.

Ingredients:

For the crust:

1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
5 and half tablespoons melted butter (preferably unsalted)
a pinch of salt

For the cheesecake:

2 cups cream cheese (2 large packets) at room temperature
2 large eggs
2/3 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract.

For the sauce or topping:

raspberries
sugar

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F.
Mix together all the ingredients for the crust. make sure the crumbs are not completely soaked in the butter. Mix thoroughly so that the butter, sugar and crumbs are well combined.
Press the crust mixture to the bottom of the pan and up the sides with your fingers.
Mix the ingredients for the cake, cream cheese, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract. Beat with electric mixture at low-medium speed. I mixed this with a hand whisk, but an electric mixer with make this process a lot easier, but do not use high speeds as this will incorporate a lot of air into the batter. Mix well so that there are no lumps, that’s why one needs the cream cheese nice and soft at room temperature.
Put the batter into the cake pan and into the oven. Bake at 350F for 28 minutes. Turn off your oven leave the door open and let it cool inside gradually for about 2 – 3 minutes. The first time I made this, I took the cake out of the oven as soon as I turned off the oven and this made the cake to fall in the center because of the temperature change outside. So I guess it’s better to let it cool inside for a couple of minutes.
Remove from oven and let it cool. Once cool, refrigerate until you are ready to serve.
Now for the topping, I just decorated mine with washed raspberries and spooned some hershey’s chocolate sauce over it. But you can also make a raspberry sauce/coulis and serve each slice with a dollop of this sauce. I will make this and share an updated pic soon! 🙂
To make the sauce, add a cup of water and 2 cups washed raspberries to a pan and boil. let the raspberries completely melt into the water, add 2 – 3 tbsps of sugar or to taste. Add more or less sugar as you like. simmer till it becomes thick and the right consistency for a sauce that you desire. Let it cool before serving with cake.

Hope you have lots of fun trying out this recipe. Please do let me know how it turned out for you guys 🙂 In the meanwhile, here a couple of pictures of the cheesecakes I made.