In the course of browsing YouTube and Google Video for amusing videos, I watched quite a few of the chronicles of Morning Musume, including Ayaka’s Surprise English Lessons, a sketch in which Ayaka, a bilingual Musume member and leader of Coconuts Musume, would waylay the other girls in the studio with promises of treats if they co-operated with learning English phrases from her. In one of these segments, Iida Kaori, the girl who had received the day’s impromptu lesson chose a slice of something called “rare cheesecake†from Ayaka’s fancy tray of cakes. I was curious as to what would make a cheesecake a rarity, if it was just an unusual dessert in Japan, or if they used a particularly hard-to-find kind of cheese, or what. Well, it turns out that I was taking the wrong meaning of “rare” and that “rare cheesecake†is a no-bake cheesecake, as I learned after I did a recipe search for Japanese desserts. It also turns out that rare cheesecake is very, very easy to make, and so I made one. I’d always been kind of intimidated to try baking a regular cheesecake, but this one is so easy that a little kid could make it. No stove, no oven, no fancy techniques. The only major tool you really need is an eggbeater, though an electric mixer is easier.
You need one package of cream-cheese (the 8-ounce size) and one tub of yogurt (the 6-oz size), 1/3 cup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of gelatine powder (I use the vegetarian agar-agar kind) and ¼-cup of water. Also 3 tablespoons of butter and maybe 6 graham crackers, for the crust. I used the 1/3 fat cream-cheese and fat-free yogurt. Anyway, you make a graham cracker crust, as one does. And if you don’t know how one does, this is how: Pulverize about 6 graham crackers and put them in a deep plastic bowl. Slice 3tbsp of butter into thin pieces and distribute them evenly among the cracker dust, then take your eggbeater and scramble the crumbs and butter until the butter and crumbs are evenly combined, and they will be a little bit sticky. Pour the buttery crumbs into a glass pie plate and press them to the bottom and sides. There you have a graham cracker crust.
The cream-cheese part of the cake is very easy, too. You will want to have the cream-cheese out of the fridge for a while so that it is soft. Just dump the package of cream-cheese in another bowl along with the tub of yogurt and the sugar and mix it with the eggbeater until smooth. Then, dissolve the gelatine powder into the water and microwave it for one minute. Pour that into the cream-cheese mixture and continue beating it with the eggbeater until that is all blended in evenly. Then pour that into your graham-cracker crust, cover it with cling-film, and place it in the refrigerator to set up. Easy, easy, easy!
I used lemon flavor yogurt for a subtle flavor, and I have a little jar of lemon-curd to use as sauce for this cheesecake. I have not sampled it yet, though I tasted the batter, of course, and it was good. I think this recipe will be nice for summertime dinner parties, especially with the lemon flavor, though one could of course do a plain cheesecake with unflavored yogurt, or experiment with other flavors. The texture will be a little bit different from the baked kind of cheesecake, but the flavor should be pretty similar, and it is SO easy, which is rather gratifying.
Use 2 g (1 sachet) for 200 to 500 ml preparation depending on required texture. The more agar, the harder and more breakable the gel (for example: 2 g for 200 ml). Agar is a versatile gelling ingredient.