Cheap Eats: Cheesecake

I love cheesecake. Proper baked New York style cheesecake. It’s my fave.

So when I saw Philidelphia half price in Morrisons, there was no doubt in my mind. Time to bake!

We’ve tried a few recipes, and the best has been from Dan Lepard’s book Short & Sweet. Each time we’ve made it, it’s been bang on. Creamy yet firm, strong vanilla but balanced by just the right amount of lemon. We’ve made a few changes though, changing the base from hobnobs to ginger nuts, having a smaller base, and personally I like to leave out the lemon.

With the half price cheese and the gingernuts also on offer our shop came to £7.20 (it’d be £6.29 if we’d got the cream cheese at Asda). Yes I know that’s an expensive cheesecake, but it’s MASSIVE. 1.2kg to be exact. That’s 60p per 100g from Morrisons, and a fantastic 52p per 100g at Asda. You could easily half the ingredients to have something more manageable (which I think we’ll do next time!).

Still, is it really a cheap eat? Well,
If you bought a ready made one from the supermarket you’d pay the following:

Those individual Gu ones are £3.59 for two (£1.99 per £100g)
Waitrose sell a 540g one for £3.99 (that’s 73.9p per 100g)
Tesco’s finest is £4.40 for 620g (71p per 100g)
Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference is £6 for 950g (63.2p per 100g)

Obviously it’s only this price because the cream cheese was on offer. And yes, you could get a basic or frozen one, but Be Clever With Your Cash is all about getting the best value from your money so you can spend it how you want. And if you want to eat well, this is a great dessert that really does taste so much better than anything shop bought.

Our Version

900g full fat cream cheese
Currently 87p for 200g in Morrisons & Ocado, or even better £1 for 300g in Asda

150g of sour cream
All of the supermarkets sell this size for 60p to 68p except Tesco which has 300ml for £1.10.

4 medium eggs and 2 yokes
A pack of 6 free range eggs will work out at around 22p to 24p per egg. Obviously a pack of 12 will usually work out cheaper. You can freeze the egg whites if you want rather than wasting them.

2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Bottles are generally 38ml, and two tea spoons is nearly 12ml. So you’ll use a third for this recipe. Asda and Morrisons’s own brands work out cheaper at 33p for 2 tea spoons, the rest around 50p.

275g caster sugar
2 tablespoons plain flour

If you cook you’ll probably have these in the store cupboard anyway. Average cost of a 1kg bag of sugar is £1.48, so this is roughly 41p. The flour will cost around 3p for this tiny amount.

150g Ginger biscuits
We got McVitie’s Gingernuts on offer at Morrisons for 22p per 100g, but that’s ended now. Supermarket own brand should cost you between 20p to 30p per 100g. The original recipe has 200g of hobnobs.

25g unsalted butter
This should cost around 10p-17p , depending on any offers and brand. The recipe had this amount for 200g of biscuits, but we felt that wasn’t enough for that much, but just right for this version.

It’s really really easy. You can read the original recipe here, or buy the book here for £14.31, the cheapest we could find right now.