Raspberry and Pistachio Mini-Cheesecakes

We set ourselves a rainy day lock-down challenge of creating the ultimate mini cheesecakes. We think these wee raspberry and pistachio gems come pretty close!

We came up with this recipe ourselves using some of our favourite flavours and what we thought would be a good combination. Feel free to experiment yourself, i.e. peanut butter, salted caramel, blueberry. As long as the substitutes have a similar nature and measure, you should be good as gold to take a little creative license.

Ingredients

For the base

1/2 cup raw walnuts (or any nuts you've got in the pantry)

1/2 cup ground almonds

4 pitted dates (soaked in boiling water)

2 tablespoons coconut oil

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

For the cheesecake

2 cups raw cashews (soaked for half an hour in boiling water)

1/2 cup canned coconut milk

1/4 cup coconut oil melted and cooled

1/3 cup of honey

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/4 cup of freeze dried raspberries (fresh will also work)

1/2 cup shelled pistachios

1 tablespoon vanilla essence

Method

1. Grease a set of muffin tins with oil or butter. Set aside.

2. Add the walnuts, ground almonds, pitted dates, coconut oil, cinnamon and salt to a food processor and blend until it comes together into a sticky dough of sorts. Be sure not to over process or you might find it'll turn to nut butter (not the worst situation, but still). Press the dough into the bottoms of the prepared muffin tins, about 5mm thick.

3. In the same food processor (no need to wash), combine all of the cheesecake filling ingredients except for the raspberries and pistachios and blend until smooth and creamy. If your blender is struggling (like mine does), you might need to add some more lemon juice or coconut milk to get things moving.

4. Pour 1/2 of the creamy mixture into a bowl and set aside, meanwhile add the pistachios to the remaining mixture and pulse until blended. Evenly distribute this pistachio mix into the tins on top of the base. Sit in freezer for 20 minutes.

5. After you've rinsed your blender, put the other creamy mixture back in and blend with the freeze dried raspberries - this will form your second layer.

6. Take the tins out of the freezer and spread the final raspberry layer. Sprinkle on extra freeze dried raspberries and crumbled pistachio before putting back into the freezer to set for three hours.

7. You can serve them frozen, or if you'd prefer a softer creamier texture you can sit them out at room temp for 1-15 mins before eating.

Enjoy!

Eva x