I’m a sucker for a good cheesecake; especially if it’s topped with cherries! We’ve tried a few different recipes from Brian Lagerstrom before and ran across this one and thought it was worth testing. Cheesecakes are notoriously finicky as they generally require a water bath, often crack on top, and take forever to make. This recipe doesn’t require a water bath which seemed intriguing! I’m a visual person and it helps me to watch someone else make something I’m about to attempt so I love that all of Brian’s stuff is on YouTube. As a note, he also has the recipe in the caption area too so you can easily reference amounts while making this.

You start by making a graham cracker crust and this is going to make a good amount because you’re going to do a crust on the entire bottom and side of a spring-form pan. This is the first time we’ve ever tried a cheesecake recipe that does this so I was curious about this step but it helps the top not crack since you aren’t using a water bath. Plus, as he said it does look a little nicer (though ours was a little on the rugged side).

For the cheesecake filling we followed the recipe as is except for the goat cheese. Neither my husband or I are goat cheese fans so we just used another block of cream cheese. As a reminder, be careful not to over mix the batter once you add the eggs.

You’re going to bake this for 60 minutes; then turn off the oven and let it sit in there another 45 minutes. Like with most cheesecake recipes you’ll want to let this come to room temperature before popping it in the fridge for 10 hours.

The cherry topping is easy to throw together and we used unsweetened frozen cherries since they were easy to find. You just mix everything together and then let it cook until syrupy.

This recipe is easier than most cheesecake recipes since it doesn’t require a water bath so that’s a bonus and it definitely didn’t seem to take as much time as the Foolproof New York Cheesecake I tried a few years ago. It’s not super complicated; though it took a little work to do the sides of the crust and as you can tell in the picture it wasn’t necessarily even.

As for taste, this recipe is really good and not super sweet. The crust along the entire side of each piece added a nice texture as well. I’ll be honest though; I think I preferred that recipe taste-wise even though it’s sweeter and definitely preferred the Cherry Coulis as I felt like it had a better taste and consistency. It is possible I didn’t let the topping get as syrupy as it should though and I used fresh cherries for the coulis so I think it’s absolutely worth trying the topping again to see how those changes might affect things. I might also back down on the lemon as I felt like I tasted more of it than the actual cherry flavor.

Visually this is one of the prettiest cheesecakes we’ve ever made (well, except for this Chocolate Cheesecake we made last year!). It didn’t crack which was great so the crust trick worked!

	Cheesecake	Cherry Topping
Baking Ease	8	10
Time Spent	6	10
Taste	9	8
Visual	9	9

Recipe Used: Brian Lagerstrom