Triple Strawberry Cheesecake Recipe

Strawberry flavor from: real strawberries, strawberry pudding, and strawberry gel

I don’t much care for fruit in my cheesecake that is too subtle to really notice.

I haven’t seen any recipes that really hit more than 1 strawberry ingredient, so I improvised on some of the banana pudding cheesecake recipes. Somehow it turned out very good, with all of the eaters in my household recommending it!

Crust:
1 box of cinnamon crackers
1/3 cup of brown sugar
1 stick of butter
1 teaspoon (or so) of salt

Cheesecake Filing:
3 8 oz boxes of cream cheese
16 strawberries
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
3 large eggs
1 package of strawberry pudding
(got my Sonic’s stawberry milkshake pudding from Amazon)
1 cup of granulated sugar
1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream
4 oz of sour cream

Garnish on Top:
1 pack of strawberry gel
(I found some randomly in the produce section of my Food Lion grocery store)

A slice of the cheesecake: look at those layers!

Instructions:
Making this cheese cake follows many of the normal cheesecake steps, with a couple very important exceptions.

Set the oven to 350 degrees. You will be baking the crust for ten minutes. Making the crust is normal: put the crackers in a plastic bag and use a stone object (could be a plate or a stone cup) to grind it as granular as you can get it without too much effort. Then combine the cracker bits with a melted stick of butter (I put it in the microwave for 45 seconds), the brown sugar, and salt and put it in the oven for 10 minutes.

The filling requires some cooking before you do the cooking. To avoid fruit that is too hard, you should dice 8 of the strawberries and mash the remaining 4. Then combine this with the lemon juice in a sauce pan on the stove. Let it cook for one minute. I would let this cool at least 5 minutes before adding with the rest of the filling.

When you combine the elements of the filling (everything except the strawberry gel), put the cream cheese in at room temperature. I put them in a plastic bag with warm water for 20–30 minutes to get them room temperature. For the most part it doesn’t matter what order you add the incredients, but the pudding should come dead last (it starts setting on contact with liquid, so you only have a few minutes to pour it once its mixed).

Then put 9 or so dollops of strawberry gel on top. Take a spoon and make a few spirals through the surface of the filling with the spoon. Don’t spiral it too much or it will be blended in, and make sure to do it a little bit so there aren’t just lumps of strawberry gel on top.

This is what it should look like after you put the dollops of strawberry syrup on.

Baking a cheesecake is a little strange. If you’ve never done it before, you are supposed to wrap it in tin foil and set it in a larger container of boiling water. I get the same results by putting the 9 inch spring foam pan inside a 10 inch pan which has no cracks or seems into the water bath containing hot water (boiling water doesn’t make much of a difference).

The filling will take 60 minutes to bake-or more if it is liquidy when you remove it from the oven. By “liquidy” I don’t mean sticking a toothpick in and seeing the hole fill in when you take it out. If you were going to do that, it should fill in. But don’t put the toothpick in. What I mean is if it largely stays together when you rock it back and forth a bit and isn’t really “pourable”. If you keep it in for an extra 10–15 mins longer than the ideal it will be fine.

Once the normal baking has ended, turn the oven off and leave the oven door open for 30 mins to finish. It will solidify the rest of the time in the fridge (keep it in there for at least four hours, but over night is better).

Original Recipe at: Spicy Southern Kitchen