I’m back at it again! This time in the Musatov kitchen over a cold and snowy winter weekend, I’m baking up a homemade gluten and egg free cherry cheesecake! Now, if you know anything about cooking in the kitchen, you probably by now realize that eggs are quite the essential ingredient. I’m going to read your mind… “How is she going to make a cheesecake without eggs?” BINGO, right you are to question me like that, but if you have been following my baking series then you know that I am up to any challenge.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

By now, I shouldn’t need to catch you up on literally everything that my dad is allergic to, and for some reason he has been craving cheesecake. I decided that it was up to me to create, and maybe experiment a little, with what hopes to be a masterpiece. First off, like always, I did a bit of research to see if there were any good recipes that would fit with all the ingredients that I would have to modify. I should have known… I could not find a single recipe that would work for what I wanted, so I decided to use my baking knowledge to create my own (oooooooh). 

I started off by making the crust for the cheesecake, and knew that it would be a struggle because I would have to use gluten free graham crackers. My dad has enjoyed these Pamela’s Honey Grahams with smores before, so I figured they would be the perfect fit for the crust. I put the whole box of grahams in a plastic bag and channeled my inner anger in order to crush it into fine pieces. Then I mixed that with one stick of melted butter, and ¼ cup of granulated sugar. I then spread that crust mixture into the bottom of a 9×13 glass pan.

Next up was the filling, now the way I created this might seem a bit extra, but it’s honestly just ingenious. I started by placing two blocks of cream cheese (semi-warm, or you know as long as you have the patience to wait for it) into a stand mixer with ¼ cup of granulated sugar and 1 capful of lemon extract (for added oomph). Yeah, that’s right… I’m so good I don’t even need to precisely measure ingredients out. After that was well-mixed, I placed it into a bowl and cleaned the mixer so that I could move on to the next step. 

After washing the mixer, I then poured one cup of heavy whipping cream into the bowl and whipped it until stiff peaks formed. You want it to look like mountain tops when you lift the mixer up. I then mixed together this whipped cream with the cream cheese mixture from before, and voila you have yourself an eggless cheesecake filling!

I smoothed this filling over the graham cracker crust, and to be even more extra I decided to put some pie filling on the top.

Now the reason I had put lemon extract in the cream cheese filling was because it was intended to have lemon pie filling on the top. Now somehow in the process we may have run into a slight botulism issue, but I promise nobody was harmed in the making. We had to improvise to a “plan B” and put cherry filling on the top, but it was still delicious!