Cheesecake with Lime Curd

This is a Trini cheesecake flavoured with lime, topped with a Lime Curd. In recording this cooking experience  - a very good one - let me credit Epicurious and Bon Appetit, as well as all those cooks who provide variations via the internet. Hopefully, my variation will be helpful in the Caribbean where we are making food with recipes and ingredients developed far away. We don't make cheese so the ricotta and cream cheeses we have access to are pre-packaged and treated to last a long time, not necessarily fresh. Still, it is possible to make something exotic with a fresh local flavour, as a  special treat.


The basic cheesecake comes to us via a Sicilian Ricotta Cheesecake. The Lime Curd comes via Joy of Cooking and the hairdresser who found the way to make a perfect curd - no eggy coagulation!

TRINI LIME CHEESECAKE

Crust:
Marie buscuits, 16 crushed
Butter, 2-3 ounces, melted

Filling:
Ricotta, 24 ounces
Cream cheese, 8 ounces
Sugar, 2/3 cup (Brown sugar used  here)
Flour, half cup
Eggs, 5 whole
Lime zest, tablespoon grated
Lime juice, 2-3 tablespoons
Salt, dusting

The pan used here is a ten-inch springform. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix crushed biscuits and butter together and press the mixture onto the bottom only of the pan, making sure to press into the crease. Bake in oven for 15 minutes. Remove from oven to cool. Reduce oven heat to 300 degrees.

Beat ricotta and cream cheese together with sugar, lime zest, juice and flour.
Beat in eggs one at a time until well blended.
Pour the filling into the centre of the pan; use a spatula to level it to the sides.

Bake at 300 degrees for 75 minutes or until the cake is light to golden brown and the centre wobbles only slightly. Remove from oven to cool. You can refrigerate to cool overnight.

 Lovely as the moon, the cracks on the cheesecake reseal as it cools.


LIME CURD

Eggs, 3
Sugar, 1 cup brown (3/4 cup white granulated)
Butter, 3 ounces, unsalted
Lime zest, grated over the mixture, one tablespoon approx.
Lime juice, half lime squeezed with pulp

Cream butter and sugar together. Add zest and juice. Beat in eggs one at a time until the batter is smooth.  It might look like clotted cream.

Heat over the "warm plate" of an electric stove, stirring until it thickens. Turn off the heat - it will continue to cook and thicken on the low heat.
(I used a glass pot to beat the ingredients together and then heated directly on the warm plate, stirring occasionally for 30 minutes until the curd was a slow-moving sauce.)

Lovely textures, tart and tender: crusty bottom, soft smooth cheesecake not too sweet, and a lime curd tangy and bursting with flavour, running down the sides. What it looked like just before Anjani ate it!