New York Cheesecake

Yep– another healthy one!  The main ingredient in this pie (cake?) is fat free cottage cheese.  This light & fluffy and delectable treat was so close to being entirely fat free, but I used regular eggs instead of  fat free eggbeaters (although I’m sure it would have tasted just as good with the beaters).

Important note: everyone needs an adorable pie server!  This one is available, on sale, here.

Some tweaks I made to this New York Cheesecake recipe:  Where it called for sour cream, I substituted plain, fat free Chobani Greek yogurt– these two are so similar, and this way you don’t end up with an unwanted container of sour cream (unless sour cream is a cooking staple for you….).  And I added about a tablespoon of  fresh lemon juice, along with the ground lemon rind called for.  Side note on the Chobani– it tastes deeelish mixed with fat free Light ‘n Fit vanilla..it creates the perfect creamy consistency, with the right amount of sweet (I know Light ‘n Fit makes a Greek version now, but it’s super sweet).  Lastly, the recipe calls for 1/3 reduced fat cream cheese, but I went with fat free.

I decided to cut the recipe in half, because 4 cups of cottage cheese and 2 whole blocks of cream cheese sounded like wayy too much (cream cheese is expensive!).   I also went with bite sized pies, and picked up some mini graham cracker pie crusts from the grocery store.  Somehow my halved recipe seemed to double itself, so I made an overflow pie (without a crust) in a smaller scale pie dish than normal (I guess this is intended to be made in a fairly large/tall pie dish).

Full recipe.

Grocery list, according to the above tweaking:

Mini graham cracker pie crusts
2 cups fat free cottage cheese (a blender works if you don’t have a food processor)
1 cup sugar (I like to do part brown, part splenda)
1 block fat free cream cheese
2 tablespoons of flour
1/4 cup Greek yogurt
1/2 tablespoon fresh lemon rind
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
3 eggs

**See similar post under recipes- “Mini Cheesecakes”..these use fat free cream cheese and the rest is Greek yogurt (so many ways to make it!).

 

Blender: 1, cottage cheese: 0

 

The crust-less, bonus pie..

 

As previously mentioned, the order of posts has been switched– you’re now indulging in Friday Flavors.  Have a great weekend, and happy cheesecake making!