No Bake Dulce de Leche Cheesecake
The class just started and I was nervous. We were waiting for the students to pile in, and I was standing at one of the stations, quietly slicing limes for our cocktails.
And then I cut my finger.
That’s right, friends, I cut myself at the cooking class I was teaching.
Granted, it was a very small cut. Almost like a paper cut (hurt like a paper cut too) and it mostly ruined my manicure, but what a way to inspire confidence in the students, right? It was a good thing – no, it was a fantastic, marvelous thing – that they were all incredibly nice and warm and then everyone laughed and then I distracted everyone and we made this cheesecake.
No Bake Dulce de Leche Cheesecake.
This was part of our menu that Dan and I created for our “Entertain Like a Food Blogger” cooking class at the BCAE. We made dinner party food: a few appetizers, a cocktail, and this delicious cheesecake.
You all know that I am obsessed with dulce de leche (cookies, cake balls, brownies, pies, bars, cocktails, I love them all) and I have a recipe for Dulce de Leche Cheesecake on this blog already, but I figured another recipe – this time for a no bake version, with a bonus chocolate crust – wouldn’t hurt.
This recipe combines two of my favorite shortcuts for easy desserts: condensed milk and choocolate wafers. In addition, this recipe is completely no-bake, as in you do not need to turn on the oven at all and transform your small apartment into a scorching hot and very sweaty inferno. (By you, I mean me.) All you need to do is mix crushed up chocolate cookies with melted butter, then mix up the filling, then top with heated dulce de leche, then freeze and eat.
Then eat one more bar for good measure.
No Bake Dulce de Leche Cheesecake
Ingredients
Crust
6 oz chocolate wafers, crushed (about 2/3 of Famous Wafers package) or 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
3/4 stick butter, melted
Cheesecake Filling
16 oz cream cheese, room temperature
1 cup condensed milk
1 cup dulce de leche
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
Topping
1/2 cup dulce de leche
Directions
- Make the crust. Mix chocolate wafer crumbs and butter in a medium bowl. Transfer crumb mixture to a buttered and foil-lined 8x8 baking pan and press evenly onto bottom using the back of a spoon. Refrigerate while making filling.
- Make the cheesecake filling. In a large mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, condensed milk, dulce de leche, vanilla, and salt, and beat together until smooth.
- For the topping, drizzle remaining dulce de leche on top or make a swirly pattern. (You can heat the dulce de leche in the microwave first if it's too thick.) For the swirls, make four thick parallel lines of dulce de leche on top of the pie. Lightly run knife across the lines perpendicularly, letting the dulce de leche drag across to form swirls.
- Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or freeze for at least 2 hours. Cut into 16 squares and serve.
Recipe
In addition to the cheesecake, our menu for the night included these:
arepas con chorizo
ceviche
chimichurri steak crostini
And the cocktail of the night was a Paloma, which is a tequila-based drink with grapefruit soda.
In spite of my little mishap, which served as an icebreaker anyway, we had a ton of fun. Thank you so much to everyone who came to our cooking class! I had the best time, and I also had the best teaching partner who, in his defense, had no food in his beard the entire time. We will be teaching another class this coming fall/winter!