Another Cake Story: Lemon Curd Cheesecakes!

I actually made these about 2 weeks ago but never got a chance to post it...so here it is. For some reason I'm on a lemony kick recently and anything relating to it sounds so good so I thought its time to marinate my specialty of cheesecakes with my new obsession of lemons and the results:

Lemon Curd Cheesecake!

Surprisingly the lemon flavor was very subtle letting the natural cheesecake flavor shine through. I also made some mini ones in a mini cupcake pan.

Lemon Curd Madness:
Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup lemon juice
• 3 large eggs (at room temp)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 4 tbsp butter (at room temp)

Steps:

1. Whisk together eggs, sugar, lemon juice in a double boiler and once it thickens strain into another bowl
   
2. Stir in butter
3. Cover. I make sure the top of the curd is touching the plastic wrap in order to avoid the skin to form. Once that is done, it's okay to place into the fridge.

Cheesecake Delight:
This should fill 1 standard 8" spring foam or 4 mini 4.5" spring foam pans.
Crust ingredients:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 package of crushed graham crackers
• optional: a little bit of butter so its slightly crumbly

cheesecake ingredients:

• 3 8oz packages of cream cheese
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs (slightly beaten)
• 2 tbsp of flour
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 cup of milk (skim, low fat, or whole)

1. Combine and mix the crust ingredients together and line the bottom of the pan (spring foam is best) with it.
   
2. Combine cream cheese, vanilla, sugar, and flour together. This can be done by hand (which is a pain) or with a hand mixer.
3. Mix the milk into the batter with the mixer (or stir in by hand)
4. This is where I get lazy, I make a small ditch in the batter, crack the 3 eggs in there and pop the yolks, stir it around (aka my version of slightly beaten eggs) before incorporating it into the rest of the batter. This last step can be done without the mixer or be careful of over-beating if you are beating with a mixer. Stir in the lemon curd.
5. Toaster oven: bake for 30 minutes at 325 degrees. Regular oven: 375 degrees for approx 40-50 minutes. I've only baked it in a toaster oven so for big ovens I suggest 45 min bake time and then leave it in the oven until the oven is completely cooled before removing. This also helps with preventing cracks.