Image Credit: Amour de cuisine

Can you believe the nerve of that No-Bake Cheesecake? No water bath? What? No springform pan? Stuffed to the gills with Cool Whip? How presumptuous!

No-Bake Cheesecake

Manning a kitchen involves the curation of recipes. When I’m not searing meat, or buttering buns, or cursing a box of plastic wrap, I’m surfing the net in search of kick-ass recipes. Welcome to miLam’s Curated Exhibits series.

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Exhibit № II: miLam’s been exploring the world of no-bake cheesecakes, in search of those whose philistine whipped-topping provenance is transcended by its lofty culinary achievement, in order to induct them into the No-Bake Cheesecake Hall of Fame.

No-Bake Cheesecake
aux fraises et speculoos

The No-Bake Cheesecake Hall of Fame

You probably know people who consider their badass Wolf C72-SS-6B-36GT Challenger Xl restaurant-quality double oven to be proof that no-bake cheesecakes are pedestrian. They probably bake cheesecakes with cream cheese made from organic milk on a commune where the cows are free to leave at any time if they so wish. I have just two words for those people: Cool Whip.

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Jeff’s Entry-Level No-Bake Cheesecake

Makes one 9-inch cheesecake, serving approx. 12 unashamed people

Delicious refrigerated or frozen

Beat the cheese. Add the milk and beat it some more. Make sure there are no tiny lumps of cream cheese whatsoever. On lowest speed, beat in Whip just until incorporated. Add juice and beat just until homogenized. Scrape it into a graham cracker crust and fluff with a spatula. Sprinkle on zest; don’t feel as though you have to use all of it. Put the cheesecake in the fridge, preferably overnight.

Substitutions for the lemon juice:

• Any citrus juice that, to be consumed as a beverage, would have ‑ade tacked on to the end. Lime, for instance. Freshly-squeezed if you’re bad-ass.
• ⅔ cup any frozen juice concentrate. Do not reconstitute.
• Something clever, like: put ½ cup bittersweet chocolate in a glass measuring cup and nuke until nearly melted (perhaps 45 seconds, but do this carefully). Finish off the melting by stirring. Add two Tbs. orange juice and stir until beautifully smooth and homogenized. Use this in place of the lemon juice. Garnish pie with orange zest and/or chocolate shavings.

So Dirty:

It’s the Cool Whip, isn’t it? This recipe looks really tempting, but you can’t bear to open up your Sub-Zero BI-48SID Side-by-Side Refrigerator/Freezer and find a tub of Cool Whip inside, amiright? Cool Whip. It’s so deliciously low. So horribly dirty. You could try taking it out of its plastic container and placing it in a decorative glass bowl. Or, you know, you could probably use whipped heavy cream instead. No one would have to know the whip’s provenance.

Martha – bless her dark, dark soul – could probably make homemade Cool Whip using nothing but mineral oil and a marshmallow. Nonetheless, she does a no-bake cheesecake that uses the exact – I say, exact – same ingredients as the ones I’ve given you, but she simply omits the Cool Whip. That’s it. No Whip, no substitute for it … just leaves it out. Even still, she considers it to be the kind of dessert a child would make.

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• Exhibit № I: No-Bake Therapy
• Exhibit № III: The Fudge Brownie Collective

Next Up:

Baked Salmon