The fear of Cheese

Turophobia - the fear of cheese. Such condition exist. But no, the fear that I have is not the kind which will fear eating, smelling, or coming near cheese. It's rather fear of making & baking cheesecakes! Can you believe it?

When people finds out that I bake, they will ask me - what do you bake? Cheesecake? Chocolate Cake? Whilst choc cake is not a major problem, I will not even venture into making cheesecake. A few days back my Bestie gave me a link for a no-bake / no mixer needed cheesecake and I simply told her that I will never venture into trying to make any cheese related cake. Then, coincidentally, a few days later, my son just got to ask me with pleading eyes - "Mummy, can you make me a cheesecake?" I almost called the lady who bakes better-than-Secret-Recipe-Oreo-Cheesecake and beg her to come over to Kuching to bake for Noel! Thanks to her "not-in-the-mood-to-start-blogging-yet", I didn't have a guru to lead me through! Boo Hoo HOO! Haha. Well, the little one still deserve to be pleased, so onwards I march.

Even if I fear making cheesecakes, I've bookmarked quite a number of recipes related to it. This Ribena Marble CheeseCake is one of them. I love the fact that it's a no bake (thus I don't have to worry about water-bake method - whatever that is :P) , and that it uses Ribena - our well loved evergreen fav cordial. So, I picked this to be my ground breaking recipe into the cheesecake world.

I had to work with unfamiliar ingredients... Cream Cheese, Digestive Cookies and Gelatine... Nervous will be a fairly mild word to describe how stressed up I was.

The base layer was relatively easy with crushing the biscuits and mixing it with melted butter. Freezing needed an hour.

Then came the filling. Never. I have never worked with Cream Cheese so I didn't know if the consistancy was supposed to be this watery? Oh well, one need to proceed anyways.

This is a marble effect cake and with the mixture being so watery, I was wondering, how on earth will I get a marble effect. So I simply threw in the portion with Ribena and top up the "white"portion, then swirl around and tada.... Not bad eh? Refrigerate for 2 hours.


And because I do not have spring form baking tin and I was lazy to line my normal baking tray with aluminium foil / baking paper, I decided to just make the cake in a Tupperware. I think I should have used a smaller one and my base was a tad too loose when the cake was sliced.


The recipe called for a glass layer. The original blogger did not cover it up and she said it lacked the Ribena flavour, so I decided to go ahead with full recipe. Leave to refrigerate (I left mine overnight).

The next morning, I almost jumped out of bed wondering how the cake turned out. This is a very light cheesecake as it called for yogurt. It's a nice cooling cake - almost jelly like sliding down the throat. The Ribena gave it a nice sourish taste and the colours are freshing.


Brought 4 tiny pieces for the Loyal Guinea Pigs to try in the office - on the scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the worst), this cake got a vote of 8.5. Which is rather high for a first timer. Hurray! So, since this attempt was considered a success, I will now, venture more, into the land of the unknown and overcome my baking turophobia!