No-Bake Whipped Cream Cheesecake

The Heavenly Cake Bakers are making the Lemon Canadian Crown this week.   I made this cake last November.  I had come to Poland to spend Thanksgiving with my husband and our daughter, who was en route from Austria back to AZ.  It was a fun trip and a wonderful, creamy cake.  Since I’ve already made this one and still have many on my “to-do” list, I decided to flip to another recipe in the cheesecake category and make the No-Bake Whipped Cream Cheesecake.  Due to another of my many Polish language oversights in the grocery store, this became a Neapolitan cheesecake.

The recipe calls for a pound of whipped creamed cheese.  Cream cheese is serek in Polish, and they have several varieties in the dairy case.  I know because they have pictures of chives, herbs, peppers, berries on the label.   Bitą  would be whipped; none of the cream cheese had this word on the label.  (Have I mentioned how much I love the iSpeak Polish app on my iphone?  I should use it more often.)  I found a brand without pictures, I bought it thinking that it must be plain cream cheese.

When I got home, I noticed that I had two different kinds of cream cheese.  The translator app told me that I had strawberry cream cheese and “taste of chocolate” cream cheese.  I could go back and buy the Philly cream cheese.  They had it, but as an imported item it was more expensive.  I decided to use the flavored cheeses.  This would be the kitchen equivalent of “play the ball where it lies.”

My plan was to keep the cream cheeses separate.  I wanted them to keep their pink and brown colors rather than become a muddy gray.  I also worried that as I added the custard and Italian meringue the flavors would become too diluted to be recognized, so I added some raspberry coulis to the strawberry, and 2 ounces of melted dark chocolate and a tablespoons of cocoa to the chocolate.

I don’t remember seeing graham crackers in the store here, so when I came across these from the folks who makes rye crisps, I bought them.  They were more like a rye crisp (airy & bland) than a graham cracker, so I doubled the sugar and salt in making the crust.  The crust turned out well, but the texture was still a little different.  More like a pretzel crust than graham cracker.

Unlike my other blog posts, as part of the Heavenly Cake Bakers, I don’t post recipes from this book on the Internet. One of the reasons for this baking group is to encourage readers to purchase the cookbook. That strategy worked on me! After follow the group’s baking adventures for a couple of months, I ordered a copy from Amazon because I wanted to join in.

Lois Britton

An accountant by trade and a food blogger since 2009, Lois Britton fell in love with Polish cuisine during the years she lived in Poznań, Poland. As the creator of PolishHousewife.com,  she loves connecting readers with traditional Polish recipes. Lois has a graduate certificate in Food Writing and Photography from the University of South Florida. She is the author of The Polish Housewife Cookbook, available on Amazon and on her website.