The Most Delicious Blueberry Crumble Cheesecake

We're making a blueberry crumble cheesecake and you guys I have no words for how delicious this is but I'm telling you right now if you love a cheesecake and if you love like a blueberry crisp, a blueberry crumble, the combination of the two, best friends, okay? Absolutely divine and delicious and I cannot wait to share this one with you. It sounds complicated, it isn't, I'm doing it which means it's not that complicated. We're gonna start off with cooking the blueberries down first, I want to cook the blueberries a little bit just because I want them to become more syrupy and like just enhance their flavors and if I add them raw, which you can, it just doesn't give you the same effect so I'm just gonna pop these blueberries into a saucepan, you don't need much because believe me otherwise it makes the whole thing a little bit too heavy so this is perfect, fresh blueberries, a little bit of sugar, not much, and then I need a little bit of lemon juice but I also need the lemon zest for the filling so I'm going to zest some of the lemon zest into the bowl with my sugar for the filling, I don't need a whole lot but I do need a little bit. It's just easier to zest a whole lemon rather than a cut lemon so I'm just going to do a half, the zest of a half of a lemon, set this aside for the filling and I'm just going to cut my lemon in half and give it a nice little squeeze. I'm just going to cook these down, not for long, until they become really syrupy and they extract all of their natural liquid and that bubbles away, in the meantime I'm going to grab the teeniest, tiniest bit of cornstarch just to make a little cornstarch slurry to thicken up that juice otherwise it's just going to ruin the texture of our delicious cheesecake so I'm going to just let this hang out and do its thing, bubble away, I'll grab my cornstarch and make my slurry. These look gorgeous! I've got a little cornstarch slurry in here, I'm going to add that in and watch how quickly that goes from super liquidy to like it thickens up and it just becomes like a really gorgeous glossy thick syrup that coats the blueberries rather than just being like super liquidy, you can see like it happens quite instantly, look at that, see that? And then as it cools these will thicken up even more which is perfect, so I'm just going to take this off the heat now, I'm going to just put this back into the little bowl that I have my fresh blueberries in, and I'm just going to set this aside to cool a bit while we work on everything else because right now we've got to work on the crust, we've got to work on the filling, all the things, so I'm just going to clear my area and I'm going to grab my ingredients for the crust. To make the crust all you need is some ground graham crackers, I'm going to add a little bit of sugar, mix that together, I've also got my oven preheating to 350 and I've got a 9 inch springform pan ready and sprayed with some nonstick spray, to that I'm going to add in some melted butter, this is just melted unsalted butter, I'm going to mix that together and it'll resemble like kind of the texture of wet sand, if you don't have graham cracker crumbs but you do have whole graham crackers, just pop those into your food processor until they become graham cracker crumbs, I mean it's not rocket science, pretty basic stuff. Add that to your pan and now I'm just going to use my fingers, get in there, I'll use my fingers just to kind of even this out, right? I want it around the edges, the bottom, and you can just obviously use your hands to press it all in place. And you can also take a cup, just spray the bottom with a little bit of nonstick spray or brush it with a little bit of the melted butter so that it doesn't stick. And just press that really nice and evenly on the bottom and about an inch up the sides of the pan and now I'm just going to pop this into the oven, 350, for ten minutes just to give it like a heads up baking and then once we're there, I'll show you, but in the meantime we'll get working on the filling. Before we move ahead too quickly and make the filling, we're going to actually make the crumble topping just because I want to set it out of the way and all I need for that is flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, and a little bit of cinnamon and I'm just going to mix that with my fingers and to this I'm going to add some cold unsalted butter, you can also just melt it if you want to, it doesn't really make a difference, and I'm just going to use a pastry cutter to cut the butter into the flour, I want the mixture to be kind of coarse and the butter to be distributed throughout the flour mixture. I'm just going to take my time. That is what it should look like, looks great. I'm going to set this aside and now I'll grab everything I need to make my filling. We're going to make the base for the cheesecake which this is really my perfect base for pretty much any cheesecake, I've got a lot of cream cheese in here that's been softened at room temperature and that's really really important. I'm going to give it a mix with my paddle attachment for like a minute or so because I just want to make sure that the cream cheese is really creamy before adding anything else to it. It's not plugged in. Ow! Hang on. Back in business. Calm down. Perfect. And when you're making cheesecake it's nice to make sure all of your ingredients are at room temperature, so I've got my sugar and remember we zested some of that lemon zest so that's in there too along with just a small little pinch of salt because salt does the same thing as sweet that it does in savory, it just brings out the flavor. Some sour cream. And we need our eggs. And now I'm just going to go ahead and mix it until it's well combined, don't over whisk it because simply like if you the more you mix it the longer it goes the more air you trap in and the higher the risk of your interior just like not being super creamy and having a lot of like air pockets so just mix it long enough until the entire thing comes together but stopping every once in a while to give it a scrape around the sides. That looks gorgeous. Now, I've got my pie crust, not my pie crust, my graham cracker crust, took it out of the oven, I placed it in these little molds which I'll leave a link to this down below, these are perfect for when making cheesecake because you need to bake your cheesecake in a water bath and the alternative to this would be to line your pan on the outside with a few layers of aluminum foil but no matter how well I have ever done that water has always like seeped into my pan so by adding one of these it's like impossible for any water to get in here and your cheesecake is like the perfect texture every single time. They're really not very expensive but such a great thing to have when making cheesecake. I'm just going to get my attachment out. Let me give this a really good mix from the bottom just to make sure everything's well incorporated. Hang on, sometimes you know it's nice to give it one less mix because you can leave some things stuck to the bottom. I'm going to avoid that. I've also got some water coming up to a boil in my tea kettle because I want that to be really hot from my water bath. Now listen, I forgot to add my vanilla to my batter but here's a really quick way to fix it. I'm going to pour my vanilla into my blueberries, okay, add that in and that flavor is going to go all the way through and be delicious and beautiful. Take your blueberries. I like to do like little dollops here, little dollops there. These smell so unbelievable especially with the vanilla added in there because they're still slightly warm. Oh yeah! T'was a good move my friend, t'was a good move. And that's the thing about cooking, like relax, okay, relax. Even I make mistakes. It's cooking, it's not heart surgery. There's always a way out, there's always a way to fix it. Take your spoon and just give it a little very gentle mix, just like that, you kind of want to incorporate those blueberries in there a little bit but don't overdo it because I like the way that it looks when they kind of peek through and I don't want the entire batter to be purple, you know? Then you're going to take your topping, your crumble topping, and you're just going to pop this over the top. I like to leave the very edge out, I don't know why I'm wearing like that. Beautiful. I'm going to go grab my hot water. And now you've got to make sure you're putting your pan with the liner in a bigger roasting pan because you need to bake this in a water bath. And just pour really hot water around it until it comes about halfway up the sides of your pan and that's how you get a really beautiful silky perfectly cooked cheesecake. I'm going to pop this into my oven that I reduced the heat down to 325 and I'm going to leave this in there for about an hour. After an hour I'm going to take it out, leave it at room temperature, and then I'm going to pop it in the fridge overnight because as much as I love you, I love me a little bit more and I love the idea of eating a perfect cheesecake a little bit more so this cheesecake needs to be very cold by the time you serve it and it's only going to happen if I show it to you tomorrow, well tomorrow for me and like 30 seconds for you. And look at this magnificent beauty! Once it baked, now I baked it for a full hour at 325, then what I did was I turned the oven on to 350 and I put a five minute timer, that way it just gave me the top a little bit of color, if your oven runs hot you probably don't have to do that but my oven is temperamental, you know what I mean? Just to give it a little bit of color, otherwise one hour at 325 is perfect every single time, then it has to come to room temperature before popping it into the fridge to cool completely and I'm telling you right now, right now, this right here is the most unbelievable, first of all the texture okay, calm down, I cannot, it is insane, look at that, it is unbelievable, okay, the texture is perfect, I actually made this last week to share with you and then guess what happened, put a timer on but didn't, it baked for like twice the time, the texture was terrible, because I love you so much and because I love it so much, it was worth every shoot, sensational, the best cheesecake, so delicious, great texture, perfection all around, laurainthekitchen.com will have the recipe for you so you can print it out and you can make it yourself and you'll know, you'll understand when I say it's the best cheesecake ever, it really is, hope you enjoyed spending time with me and I will see you in the next one. Bye!