White Chocolate & Raspberry Cheesecake

So for Valentines Day this year, I thought that we would work with white chocolate, maybe my most favorite of chocolates. Although technically, white chocolate is not really chocolate as it does not contain any chocolate solids. But that’s neither here nor there: I, the kiddos and most of the world considers it chocolate so it is chocolate.

This is a no bake cheesecake and is very easy to make. We used Anchor Hocking 7 oz. mini heremes jars as our containers. This recipe made five jars.

So the recipe goes …

Place the Oreo cookies in a zip bag and use a mallet to smash the cookies into a fine crumb. Optionally, you can just add them to a food processor. But I find that kiddos always enjoy smashing the cookies. The photos we used in this tutorial were taken from the class that ran on 2/13/20. And all the kids wanted a turn smashing even though the job had been initially assigned to one student.

Once you have that fine texture pour the crumbs into a bowl. Melt the butter and then pour it into the crumbs. Use a spoon to mix the two ingredients together. Set aside.

Pour the cream to a large metal (preferably) bowl.

Add the powdered milk and

Sugar.

Stir to combine the ingredients. Place in the fridge to keep the cream cold as sugar and powdered milk melt into the cream. About 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, add 1 teaspoon water to a pot.

Lemon juice,

Raspberries and sugar. Cook on medium low heat, stirring and mashing up the raspberries.The sauce is done when it has thickened and the raspberries are all smashed, about 10 minutes.

Once cooked to the right consistency, pour into a fine mesh sieve sitting on top of a bowl. Using a spatula or wooden spoon, press the mixture to get the sauce through. You can throw out the leftover seeds. Set the sauce aside.

Place the white chocolate chips into a metal or glass mixing bowl.

Melt the white chips double boiler style on the stove top (or in a microwave, using 50 percent power and for 30 second intervals).  Set aside to cool to room temp.

Add the cream cheese to a mixing bowl. Just as I normally do when I have to cream butter and sugar together when making a cake, I always start by creaming the butter by itself first, then add the rest of the ingredients. In this case, using a hand mixer, cream the cream cheese by itself first, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Pour in the lemon juice,

Vanilla (we made a last minute substitution to use vanilla bean paste instead of regular vanilla. But you can use whatever you have on hand) and

The melted white chips. Continue beating with the hand mixer until all the ingredients are combined and there are no lumps. Set aside.

Next remove the heavy cream mixture from the fridge and hand whisk until stiff peaks are formed. Yes, I said hand whisk. I find when working with kids that hand whisking not only gives the kids something to do but it prevents over whipping the cream. I also adopted this process when I make whipped cream at home.

Add about 1/3 of the whipped cream to the cream cheese mixture. Use a spatula to mix the ingredients together. Sometimes, I will even use the hand mixer to combine all the ingredients.

Add the next 1/3 of the whipped cream and this time fold it in. We left about 1/4 to 1/3 of the whipped cream to decorate the cream cheese.

Now that all the components are done: cookie crust, cheesecake filling, raspberry sauce and whipped cream, it is time to assemble. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons of the cookie crumbs into the jar. Use a spoon to gently press down.

Then add about half of the cheesecake filling into the jar.

I poured the raspberry sauce into a piping bag to make it easier for the next coupla steps.I piped some of the sauce over the top of the cheesecake.

Add the rest of the filling to just below the top. Leave enough room if you want to pipe some decorations with the whipped cream.

I finished with piping a coupla whipped cream rosettes, a little raspberry sauce and a few Oreo cookie crumbs.

This makes a wonderful gift.