A light cheesecake?

Yes, there is such a thing!

I was talking with one of my co-workers about how he really likes this fruit tart at his favorite bakery. He described the tart shell as being slightly lemony and the custard itself to be a little tangy and creamy, but kind of fluffy and light at the same time.

His description reminded me of something I sort of invented (well, at least made) a few years ago. I was determined to recreate it so he can see if it's pretty much what they were serving.

For the crust: I would normally be using crushed cookies with butter. Since I ran out of cookies, I decided to attempt a crust with no recipe. I ended up using about a couple of cups of flour, about a couple tablespoons of chilled butter, some sugar and some lemon zest to give it extra flavor, then cutting everything in, and pressing the dough into molds before baking them.

For the custard: I decided to use about a couple of blocks of cream cheese (I approximated since I got a giant block of it from Costco and it wasn't measured out). I added the juice of two lemons, zest from both of them, some sugar and mixed them together. I used the paddle attachment, but it turned out a tiny bit lumpy, so maybe I'll use the wisk instead next time. I put this aside into a glass bowl after it was all fluffy. Washed the original bowl really good with soap (I didn't buy any extra bowls) dried it. I whipped up the whites of about 4 eggs with a bit of sugar for flavor. After the egg whites gets a bit stiff with a shiny gloss to it, I folded this together with the cream cheese mixture carefully.

Scoop some of the custard into each baked cookie crust. Chill in refrigerator overnight. I was too lazy to turn these into fruit tarts. Normally, I would shave some white chocolates and put them on top for decoration. This time around, I decided to play with my new toy and used the blow torch to burn some color onto the top of the custard mount.

End result: The custard was really yummy, but maybe I should use a bit more lemon juice next time and use the whisk to reduce the cream cheese lumps. The cookie crust was pretty hard. I should probably use more butter to keep it flakier next time. Overall flavor was great, execution in concept was good, but needs a bit of fine tuning.

BTW, the egg whites were there to give the cream cheese a fluffier texture, thus making it feel lighter.

Since I'm such a cheapskate, I couldn't very well let those perfectly good egg yokes go to waste. I decided to make a cream brulee with them. I poured cream and sugar in, but the thing looked too thick and I wanted to add milk. Since I ran out and wanted to give it a bit more flavor without having it be lemon again, I scooped some strawberry yogart into the mix. Baked them with a water bath. Sprinkle sugar and torch the top after the mixture had a chance to cool. Results have yet to be determined since I'll be having that for dinnner tonight. But I did learn a valuable lesson from this. The crunchy carmel crust on top of creme brulees need to be done when the dessert was being served and not in advance. My beautiful caramel crust got all watery the next morning.