What a difference a month makes. Scratch that. Make it almost two months since I’ve posted here. Thanks to the Covid-19/Coronavirus pandemic, our new reality is blowing everyone’s mind. I don’t think any one of us could have ever imagined that we would be cooped up at home to “flatten the curve”; i.e. prevent further spread of the virus. It’s heartbreaking how humanity feels like it has gone to a screeching halt.
Over the past few weeks, a lot of folks—us included—have turned to the kitchen to nourish and de-stress ourselves. I have received multiple requests for recipes of my food blogs past and so I will start reviving them here as I find them from the archives myself. This Light and Creamy No-Bake Cheesecake is high on the list as it it was a popular thing in our family and amongst family friends when I was young. Not everyone had a working oven and this was fairly easy to make with ingredients that were easy to find.
A Taste of “Home”
While this is obviously not a Filipino dish in any way, This was a huge treat for the family when we were growing up. This was our fancy childhood homemade treat back when my mom used to make a lot of things in the kitchen even when she had a full-time job that required a lot of overtime work. This was my time with my mom in the form of a dessert. I did crust duty and I’d be the one to evenly press the buttery crumbs on the bottom of the pan. It is simple but absolutely delicious and up to this day my brother would ask me if I can make him just the crumb.
We had such fond memories of this that when we moved to Canada over two decades ago—us immigrants feeling the weight of “missing home”—we turned to mom for her go-to recipe for no-bake cheesecake. Then she said she doesn’t have the recipe and couldn’t remember how she made it. I needed this. At that time I was nowhere close to being a novice in the kitchen, but this challenged me to dig deep and TRY to remember the recipe, which I had never even read as a kid. All I had was a taste memory and visual recollection of the steps. Oh, right. I was also in charge of blooming the gelatin, so there was that. This was my first attempt at recreating that recipe from my childhood and it was a smashing success.
I’ll be honest with you—I haven’t made this in years, but now that I’m writing about it, I might just make it again soon.
I’ve reposted the recipe and text from my blog in all its 2008 glory—the same photos from that, too.
