Strawberry and White Chocolate Cheesecake

If it’s the right time of year, go strawberry picking to get your own! Honestly, you won’t find tastier strawberries than fresh strawberries – especially if you’ve picked them yourself.

Aside from that, the best kind would be ripe strawberries bought from a farmer’s market or green grocers.

Of course, you can also get your strawberries from the supermarket. Some supermarket strawberries are delicious, although many won’t be quite ripe enough and will have travelled a long way. They won’t have that same juicy sweet taste and local, freshly picked, perfectly ripe strawberries.

If you have any extra strawberries be sure to try out this Sweet and Spicy Strawberry Salsa recipe!

Almost all of them. The UK grows about 70% of its own strawberries. The massive demand for strawberries – we eat more than twice as many as we did 20 years ago – is met by imports from Spain, Israel, Egypt and Morocco, in addition to the homegrown ones.

Strawberry season is from late May all the way through to September, sometimes into October, depending on the weather.

Strawberry picking is a great way to get the best strawberries. It’s also an excellent summer family activity – especially if you’ve got a few delicious strawberry recipes up your sleeve!

Yes… the vast majority of strawberries are picked by hand. While modern farming techniques use machines for lots of different fruits and vegetables, strawberries still rely on good old fashioned picking.

Strawberry picking is a delicate task and strawberries have to be picked when they’re just the right level of ripeness, with no visible green spots.

There aren’t many of life’s pleasures so wonderfully satisfying as a fresh, ripe strawberry on a summer’s day. Still, fresh strawberries are quite pricey and the last thing you want to do is waste them.

So, how best to store them?

Well, there are several ways to store fresh strawberries. 

The most common way to store strawberries is to wash them and pop them in a paper towel-lined airtight container in the fridge. This means you don’t have to wash them every time you want to use them.

The problem with this method is that the strawberries will get soggy very quickly and will spoil too soon. Always make sure strawberries are dry before placing them in the fridge.

The very best way to preserve strawberries is to first soak them in a vinegar/water solution (1 part white vinegar, 3 parts water), then thoroughly dry them (a salad spinner is great for this). 

Finally, and importantly, store them in a loosely covered container lined with a paper towel. Don’t cover completely – you want the moisture to be able to escape. This way, your strawberries will easily keep for a whole week.

One final tip – don’t hull (top and tail) strawberries before storing them in the fridge. This is a bad idea. The inside of the strawberry will be exposed to air and the whole strawberry will shrivel. It’ll start to go bad within a few days and after a week you’ll be tossing it in the bin.

A good quality white chocolate is best for this cheesecake recipe. Avoid the really cheap stuff – trust me, you’ll definitely be able to tell the difference.

Melting the white chocolate for the cheesecake filling is easy. The best method is to use a bain-marie. This is when you melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. This method avoids burning the chocolate – trust me, burnt chocolate is not a good smell to have lingering around in your house!

If you want to save a little bit of time, you can also melt chocolate in a microwave. Simply place the chocolate in a microwaveable bowl and microwave it in 30 second blasts, stirring in between each blast.

Across the pond in the States, most no bake cheesecake recipes call for the classic Graham crackers to make up that buttery biscuit base. 

If you are in the US, Graham crackers work perfectly well and, of course, are readily available. For me, the undisputed king of the biscuit base is the humble digestive. As they are relatively plain tasting, digestive biscuits don’t get in the way of the other flavours of the cheesecake.

The only thing you’ll need to add to the digestives is some melted butter, to give it that oh so tasty buttery quality. If you really want to, you can add a pinch of cinnamon or some lemon zest, but it’s really not essential.   

Yes it can. Making a cheesecake in advance is a great idea if you’re entertaining guests and you don’t want to be rushing around just before they come.

You can make the cheesecake and keep it chilled up to 3 days in advance. Just make sure you store the cheesecake properly in an airtight container.

The same as if you’re making the cheesecake in advance, store your cheesecake in an airtight storage container in the fridge until you’re ready to eat it. The same goes for any leftovers… make sure they’re stored properly and don’t store them for any longer than a week.

If you want to keep your cheesecake for longer, freezing it is a great option. Store your cheesecake in a freezer safe airtight container. For best results, freeze your cheesecake for no longer than a month.

Using white chocolate strawberries, that’s how!

It’s so easy to make white chocolate covered strawberries. It’s just a matter of dipping the strawberries in the white chocolate and letting them set in the fridge. Honestly, they make the perfect topping for this delicious cheesecake.

If you want to bring a little extra colour to the decoration, try scattering some mint on the top of your white chocolate cheesecake.