Little Honey Cheesecakes

These are another offering for my friend's 40th birthday party. My grandmother gave me a bag of butternut snap biscuits and I decided I wanted to make individual cheesecakes with a crumb crust, made in muffin tins.
For some very odd reason my grandmother buys large packets of Arnott's Family Assorted biscuits, but doesn't like the best ones; butternut snaps and the chocolate ripple biscuits! She only likes the boring beige Milk Coffee, Arrowroot etc. Must be a legacy of those cautiously flavoured foods of yore. So she gives great bags of the best biscuits to her grandchildren. I don't complain!

I looked at a few cheesecake recipes, but they all used far too much cream cheese for my liking. Besides its fat content, it's really quite expensive. So, I turned to Stephanie Alexander. Ms Alexander is the Elder Stateswoman of Australian cooking. Her encyclopaedic Cook's Companion is known to thousands of Australians as "The Orange Bible". Have bananas but don't know what to do with them? Go to her chapter on bananas and she'll tell you about the different varieties, how to store them, what flavours they complement and a list of excellent recipes. A wonderful resource!

Her recipe used cottage cheese and I already had the other ingredients on hand. She recommends a pastry crust, but I still chose to use my newly acquired biscuits, which I had fun bashing with a rolling pin.

Honey Cheesecake

Filling:

4 eggs
100 grams caster sugar
4 Tbls honey (distinctively flavoured, for preference. ie Leatherwood)
200 grams cottage cheese
1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 200C. Bake shortcrust pastry (or crushed biscuits) for 10 minutes to set.
Reduce heat to 180C.

Combine all filling ingredients in a food processor, and blend until smooth.
Sprinkle thickly with cinnamon and caster sugar.
Pour into case.
Bake for 30 minutes (or 15 if using muffin tin) or until set.

Sweet & yummy.