Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake Pots

This simple recipe for a set lemon cheesecake is quick and easy to make. It's a great stand-by dessert for when time is short, as if decorated carefully, it can look like the sort of dessert you've spent hours over! The only time consuming thing is setting it properly in the fridge - it needs at least 6 hours.

I speeded up proceedings even more, the last time I made it, by just pounding 6 gingernut biscuits to crumbs and sprinkling them evenly into the bottom of 3 individual dishes; I usually make the traditional firm biscuit crumb base by adding melted butter to crumbs, but as these cheesecakes were in individual dishes that didn't seem necessary.

The cheesecake mixture was made by beating 200g full fat cream cheese, 3 tablespoons caster sugar and the rind and juice of 1 lemon until smooth. Then 150mls of softly whipped double cream was folded in. By the time the cream is folded into the cheese, the mixture is already beginning to thicken through the action of the lemon juice.

This amount of cheesecake made enough to fill three x 200ml dishes. You need to take a little care filling the dishes, so that the crumb base is not disturbed. I decorated the top with thin slices from a ball of stem ginger, which were washed and dried to remove the syrup. To give the cheesecake a stronger ginger flavour, a little finely chopped stem ginger could be mixed into the cheesecake.