Roasted Strawberry and Lime Cheesecake

It’s not truly summer for me until the season’s first local strawberries are in the markets. This past weekend, we picked up a flat (that’s six quarts) of berries at a great price, and have already made a batch of our favourite strawberry ice cream. For a backyard barbeque with neighbours, I decided to make a cheesecake.

The recipe comes from Sweet, the latest book from one of our favourite authors. I decided not to make the sponge cake crust, as I really do prefer a traditional graham crust base. However, I used the one on the preceding page of the book, which adds ground almonds to the cookie crumbs and butter (but no additional sugar).

The filling itself uses 900g of cream cheese (that’s 3½ packages!), a bit of sour cream, and lots of lime zest. It really does fill up the springform tin, so just be careful if you don’t have the exact size. All of my ingredients were at room temperature (for a change), and the cake was set at the recommended baking time.

The topping was the easiest, and tastiest, thing to make: simply dusting fresh strawberries with confectioners’ sugar, and then roasting them in a hot oven until they’re soft. We did this after dinner, so the fruit was still warm when I topped the chilled cheesecake.

Overall, a wonderful summer dessert. The filling itself isn’t very dense, and is made interesting by the lime. We could have easily doubled the strawberry topping, as everyone wanted more of it.