Valentine’s Day Cheesecake Recipe

Sometimes there is no better way to say “Be My Valentine” than with a good dessert! I found one of those desserts and wanted to share this Valentine’s Day Cheesecake recipe with you. This recipe has a chocolate cookie crust and delicious lemon cheesecake with beautiful swirls of raspberry coulis hearts on top.

I always equate Valentine’s Day with a chocolate dessert, but sometimes it’s fun to try something new. The thing I love the most about this dessert is that the swirled hearts on top look so impressive but are actually super simple to make!

This recipe originally called for chocolate graham crackers to make the crust, but the store was out of them, so I used Oreo cookies. They worked great, but I literally took a butter knife and scraped the filling out of each one before I put them in the food processor. Don’t worry – it was less time consuming than you’d think!

The full recipe is included at the end of this post, but I did take photos to help you see what some of the steps look like. I have also added links to some of the tools that I used to make this recipe. They are underlined below some of the photos.

crust

When making the chocolate cookie crust, you can press it out along the bottom and sides with your fingers or you can use the bottom of a drinking glass to help. You want to press it out so that it covers the bottom and comes up a little on the sides of the pan.

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8″ Springform Pan

raspberry coulis

The raspberry coulis is so delicious! I could just eat the stuff by the spoonful, it’s that good. The nice thing is that you use frozen raspberries, so you can make this any time of year. You could also substitute strawberries for the raspberries, but the raspberries give it a deeper red color and also adds a bit of tartness that you won’t get with strawberries.

It doesn’t take long to melt and soften the frozen raspberries, and then you will want to mash them with a potato masher. If you don’t have a potato masher (why don’t you have one?), you can always use a fork.

Potato Masher

After the raspberries are mashed, you can use a handheld emersion blender or put them in a food processor to puree them completely.

Emersion Hand Blender – Cordless

When you pour the mixture back into the saucepan, pour it through a wire sieve to remove as many of the seeds as possible. There will probably be a few “escapees”, but it won’t be enough to notice.

wire sieve

The next step is to make a slurry out of cornstarch and cold water. A slurry is just a cooking term for combining a liquid and a starch to thicken sauces or gravy. When you add the slurry to the hot raspberry mixture, make sure you whisk it in immediately. If you pour it in and then stop to take a picture of it, it will clump up. Trust me on this.

cheesecake batter

For the cheesecake batter, you will be using lemon zest and lemon juice. I find the easiest way to zest a lemon is by using the small side on my box grater and grating it, but there are specific tools for zesting a lemon. In case you aren’t familiar with zesting a lemon, I took a picture so you can see that you don’t want to grate off more than just the yellow part of the rind. If you grate deeper down to the white part (the pith), it will be bitter.

box grater

lemon zester

Since you will be baking the cheesecake in a hot water bath, you need to protect the cheesecake from getting wet. The best way to do this is to wrap the springform pan with at least two layers of aluminum foil.

putting it together

The last step is what makes this so pretty. Pour your raspberry coulis into a squeeze bottle. They usually carry squeeze bottles at Dollar Tree, in case you don’t happen to have one at home. If you don’t have access to a squeeze bottle, you could spoon your coulis into a large Ziplock bag and snip a very small hole off the bottom corner of the bag.

Squeeze bottle

You might want to practice your first dot on a plate or piece of wax paper. I should have done that because my first two dots look more like splotches than dots, but live and learn. Start from the outside edge of the pan and make dots evenly spaced in a swirl pattern with your dots getting smaller as you work your way to the center of the pan.

To make them look like hearts, take a toothpick or wooden skewer, and starting with the center dot, drag the toothpick through the dots going in a reverse swirl pattern all the way back to the first dot on the outside of the pan. DO NOT stop dragging the toothpick once you have started, until you get to the very last dot.

time to bake

Bake the cheesecake for a little over an hour, until the edges look set and the center jiggles a little. Turn off the oven and keep the cheesecake in it for 2 more hours. Finally, take the cheesecake from the oven and remove the foil from the pan. Refrigerate the cheesecake for at least 2 hours before serving. When ready to serve, remove the outside of the springform pan and slice using a hot knife. Add some of the coulis to the dessert plates in a decorative pattern of your choice.

My mouth is literally watering right now just thinking about how delicious this cheesecake is with the light lemon flavor, the tart raspberry coulis and the chocolate cookie crust. If you don’t like a lemon cheesecake (what’s wrong with you!), you can substitute with 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract instead.

I hope you try this recipe. It’s a bit of a process, but isn’t your Valentine’s Day dessert supposed to be a labor of love? If you make the cheesecake, let me know in the comments section what you think of it or if you have any questions. 

Have a great week and celebrate with some cheesecake!

Xoxo Teresa

enjoy the recipe