NO BAKE Cheesecake Recipe with a Graham Cracker Crust - Perfect Every Time!

Today, I want to share with you a no-bake cheesecake recipe that's very easy to make and comes out perfect every time. Hi, sweet friends. I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's Nest, where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth, ferment, sourdough, and more. So, if you enjoy learning about those things, consider subscribing to my channel. And don't forget to click on the little notification bell below. That'll let you know every time I upload a new video. Now, we'll go over the ingredients in a minute, but the first thing I want to talk about is what type of pan that you're going to need to make this cheesecake. And you really have options. And just like with this recipe, it's very flexible. I'm going to use a springform pan, just because it's real easy to unhook it and lift it right out and serve it. Another option is if you've got a tart pan like this that has the removable bottom, this works very well too. But don't worry if you don't have either of these. You can also just make this in a pie pan. And since we're basically using a cracker crust, it's very easy to cut and scoop out as well, to scoop out a slice of it as well. So, whatever you have will work fine. And this is just a regular pie dish. Now, to make the crust for this no-bake cheesecake, you have a lot of options. You can go with something very traditional like graham crackers, or you can use any plain cookie that you have on hand. But if you don't have any cookies and you have crackers, you can use crackers as well. Now, if you decide to use crackers, you'll also want to add an additional two tablespoons of sugar to your crust mixture. And this is a great place if you're in the process of making that transition from a processed food kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen, this is a great place to use your whole sugar, your sucanat. If you're not familiar with sucanat, what it is, is it's the dried sugarcane juice. So, it has all of the vitamins and minerals in it, as opposed to white sugar that's had all of that removed. So, if you are in the process of trying to phase white sugar out of your kitchen, this is a good time to start incorporating that because you're just going to use two tablespoons and it's really not going to be very noticeable for your palate of your friends, your family, so on and so forth. So, it is a good place to start incorporating that. And if you're wondering why it's called sucanat, it's a combination of three words, sugar, cane, natural, sucanat. Now, if you have other natural sweeteners on hand, like maple sugar or date sugar, you can definitely add that as well. Again, just two tablespoons. Now, we're going to be adding a stick of melted butter to this, but if you want to use a liquid sweetener like a honey or a maple syrup, you can also do that and add your two tablespoons in. This is assuming you're using the crackers. And if you're going to do that, then you're just going to cut back a little on your melted butter. So, instead of the full stick of butter, which is eight tablespoons, you're going to cut it back to six tablespoons of butter and then the two tablespoons of your liquid sweetener. So, as you see, you have a lot of options. Now, don't worry about writing any of this down because I will put a direct link in the description under this video. Just open up the description and look for the word recipe and there'll be a link there. That'll take you directly over to my website, marysnest.com, and it'll take you directly to this recipe. And you can read it online or print it out. But if you're going ahead and just using cookie crumbs like I'm using, then all you're going to need is your one stick of melted butter. And for the crumbs, you're going to want about two cups. Now, if you're using sort of the traditional cheesecake crust of graham crackers, two cups crushed is approximately maybe two packages that are inside the box of graham crackers. And if you have a little more, a little less, don't worry. It's very forgiving. It doesn't really matter. But just about two cups is perfect. Next, for the filling, you're going to want two cups of cream cheese. Now, if you're using the store-bought block of cream cheese, you're going to want the large block, which is eight ounces. If you're using your homemade cream cheese, which we've made together in the past, you're going to want two cups. Next, you're going to want one cup of Greek yogurt, which is basically strained yogurt. And if you make your own yogurt homemade, which we've also done before, and I'll be sure to link to all of these, the cream cheese and the yogurt, in the iCards and in the description below if you want to watch those videos to learn how to do these things. But if you've got your own homemade yogurt, that's perfect. But you're just going to want to strain it for about eight hours or so to give it that consistency, that little bit of thicker consistency of Greek yogurt. And you're going to want one cup. And that'll be one cup of your homemade Greek yogurt, once you've strained your homemade yogurt, or one cup of the store-bought Greek yogurt. Next, you're going to need some powdered sugar. Some people may know this as confectioner's sugar or icing sugar. And I'm going to use three quarters of a cup. Now, if you want to use a little more, if you prefer things to be on the sweeter side, you can definitely bump this up to one cup. If you want to pull back even more on the sugar, and maybe you're trying to wean yourself off the really sweet taste of your desserts, you can cut this down to a half a cup of sugar. Now, don't worry if you don't have a confectioner's sugar, powdered sugar, icing sugar. You can take your regular granulated sugar and whirl it in your blender, and that'll turn it into this. The reason we're going to use this powdered sugar is it blends, since we're doing no-bake cheesecake, it blends a little better so that you don't have any grit in the final cheesecake at all. So, if you are just working with regular cane sugar and you whirl it in your blender, you're basically just going to pulse it, and it's going to maybe take 30 seconds, maybe 60 seconds. It really shouldn't take any more than that, and then you're going to have powdered sugar. Now, I'm using the white sugar here. This is the one that's had the molasses and so on and so forth extracted out of it, and that's because I'm making this no-bake cheesecake, which I'm going to decorate with strawberries and blueberries for our Independence Day celebration, 4th of July, here in the United States. But, if you don't need your cheesecake to be bright white like that, because I'm trying to mimic the colors of our flag, red, white, and blue, with the cheesecake and the berries, but if you don't need to do that, you're going to decorate it in some different way, then you can just blitz in your blender some of your sucanat, or your maple sugar, or your date sugar, whatever dry form whole sweetener you have, and turn it into its own version of a powdered sugar. Now, the color of your cheesecake will be more like a coffee with cream color, which is fine, and it's nice because you're using a whole sugar in place of just using the plain white sugar. Whenever we can work at increasing the nutrition, especially of desserts, the better, but I'm making a little exception here for the 4th of July. Next, you're going to need two teaspoons of vanilla extract, and again, yes, you can use your homemade vanilla extract or your store-bought vanilla extract, and if you want to know how to make homemade vanilla extract, we did that in the video earlier, I'll be sure to link to that in the i-cards and in the description below. And then next, you're going to need one cup of heavy whipping cream, and you're going to want to make sure that it's heavy whipping cream, not the the table cream, which is a little lower in fat, sometimes labeled table cream, or I'm trying to think if there's... You have to tell me in the comments below if, depending what country you live in, I know there are different grades of cream, but here in the U.S., we call this heavy whipping cream, and that's because it's got enough fat in it that we can whip it into whipped cream, you know, the fluffy the fluffy cream that you top desserts with and whatnot, and that's what we're going to do with this. We're going to whip this and turn it into whipped cream, so you do need one cup of heavy whipping cream. And then finally, if you're using your homemade cream cheese and you didn't add any salt into it, that's how I make it. You certainly can add salt into it before you put it into the mold, which you can see in the other video where I show you how to do that. If you have not added any salt, which I don't because I like it to be a little more flexible and also be able to use it as a mascarpone, you are going to need a pinch of salt, just a pinch, and that's if it's a homemade cream cheese that you've not added any salt to. Now, the first thing that we're going to do is take our two cups of crumbs, in my case cookie crumbs, and I'm going to go ahead and just pour in my one stick of melted butter. And then I'm just going to mix this together until the crumbs are well saturated. Once you've got all your crumbs saturated with the melted butter, you're just going to take them and pour them right into whatever pan you're using. Now, once you get everything into your pan, whether you're using the springform pan like me or the tart pan with the removable bottom or your simple pie pan, whatever you've got, you just want to take clean hands and you want to start pressing down your crust. And in the pie pan, it's easy because you can just go right up the sides, and the same with the tart pan. But with the springform pan, what you're looking at is to just come up the sides maybe about an inch. Now, once you get your crumbs all pressed into whatever pan you're using, go ahead and put this into your refrigerator while we prepare the rest of the ingredients. Now, I want to mention something about the crumb crust. You can definitely bring out your food processor if you have one and put your cookies or your crackers and your melted butter and sugar, if you need to use it because you're using crackers, in your food processor and whirl it to get it all into the consistency and texture that you need. However, I never really like to do that because I find that it's very easy to just take my cookies or my crackers, put them in a plastic bag and just go over them a couple of times with the rolling pin, maybe 30 seconds, and I've got cracker crumbs and then I don't have to worry about cleaning up the food processor. But if you want to do it in the food processor, you definitely can. Now that our crust is chilling, we're going to take our electric hand mixer and we're going to beat the cream cheese for about three minutes till it's light and fluffy. Certainly, if you want to do this by hand, you can, but you're going to need some good arm strength. But I'm going to just go ahead and use the electric mixer to do this. Well, I beat this for about three minutes and it's nice and light and fluffy. And now we're going to go ahead and add in our confectioners or our powdered or icing sugar. Well, I got that powdered sugar in there, but I just wanted to get a spatula to just get out every little last bit. Now I'm going to go ahead and put in my Greek yogurt and then in goes our vanilla. And then, as I said, if you're using the homemade cream cheese that you didn't add salt to, just add in your pinch of salt now. Now we're going to mix all of this and blend it very well, probably another two or three minutes to make sure that everything's fully incorporated and light and fluffy. While I whip this for about another three minutes until everything was incorporated and until it got nice and light and fluffy. And now we'll get ready to move on to the next step where we're going to whip the whipped cream and fold that into this mixture. Now we'll go ahead and pour this cream into our bowl and we'll whip this until it's nice and light and fluffy. Well, I've got the whipped cream now, all nice and light and fluffy, beautifully whipped. And we're just going to add this right in to our mixture. Now we'll just fold in that whipped cream very gently just until it's fully incorporated with the rest of the ingredients. Now I've got my crust out of the fridge and I'm going to go ahead and pour this mixture right in. Now, once you get the mixture all poured into your pan, what you want to do next is just go around and smooth it out evenly. Now that we've got it all smoothed out, we're ready to pop it in the fridge and we're going to want to let this chill for eight hours. Then we'll take it out, we'll decorate it with fruit, give it a slice and a taste. Well, I let this chill in the refrigerator for eight hours. So I'm going to remove this covering that I just put on it. Oh, look at this. Oh, it looks glorious. Well, let's release it from the springform pan and we'll decorate it. Well, I went ahead and put this up on a cake stand so it'll look really nice for the presentation. And I'm just going to loosen this gently. Then I've got a butter knife here and not like a heavy serrated knife, just a very plain knife. I'm going to dip it in some warm water and then I'm just going to kind of go around the edges just to loosen anything that may be stuck to the pan. And now we'll lift this right off and we'll have our reveal. Oh my goodness, doesn't that look lovely? Well, I'm very pleased with how this came out. Now we'll get ready to decorate it. Now, I'm going to do the red and blueberries for Independence Day, but you can put any topping you want on this. You could put a crushed fruit, you could warm a little jam or jelly and pour that on top. Let it cool a little bit. Don't pour it on hot since this is no bake. So this needs to be kept cold. But there's a lot of, you could maybe drizzle a little chocolate on top. I think that would be wonderful. Or you can do chocolate shavings. There's so many ways. This is such a versatile, basic no bake cheesecake that you really can do a lot, you know, in terms of the flavoring. Well, what I'm going to do, I've got some blueberries here that have been washed and I'm just going to go ahead and put those right in the middle. Now I've got some strawberries here where I cut off the tops so I could get them to lay flat and I'm just going to go all around the outside. Now remember, if you're decorating it like this and you use strawberries, don't throw out those strawberry tops that you cut off because you can use those to make a strawberry top scrap. I think that's what I call it, vinegar. And I'll be sure to put a link in the iCards and in the description below in case that's something that you want to make. It's a lot of fun, very easy to do and very tasty. Well, look at this glorious cheesecake. I'll definitely put an overhead shot up so that you can see how pretty it came. Now, time for the taste test. All righty, well, I'm going to dip this into some hot water and we'll give this a slice. Oh, this just looks glorious. All righty, here we go. I'll get that first slice, then I'll get the next slice and then we'll slide it out with the pie thing. Pie server, I couldn't remember what it was called. Well, the first slice is always a little messy, but I'll bet it's going to taste good. All righty, here we go. Oh, that is so tasty. Oh, it's so rich and creamy. I think you're going to really enjoy this. Well, I want to wish all my sweet friends here in the United States a very happy Independence Day on this 4th of July. And to all my sweet friends around the world, I wish you good health and a life filled with happiness and all of God's blessings. And if you'd like some more ideas for easy desserts, be sure to click on this video over here where I also show you how to make a colonial beverage perfect to go with this cheesecake. And I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen. Love and God bless.