Recipe: Blueberry Cheesecake 2 Ways

It is berry season out in California. I know because they have all been on sale like crazy at the grocery store. 16 oz of blueberries for $1! I don't like blueberries that much, but how could I resist?! Plus, I know the bf loves blueberries, and I've had a few blueberry baked goods saved on my Pinterest recipe board that I had been dying to try. So it seemed like a perfect time to stock up and try my hand at making something new.

First up was this no-bake cheesecake. I followed the recipe from the link on Pinterest, but it is Hungarian (or something) translated into English. The result is that the measurements are totally wonky (grams and milliliters), so I messed up the gelatin ratio despite my best attempts at conversion. So don't use that recipe! Try this recipe instead, which looks identical, from what I can tell, except that it is easy to use for us non-metric Americans. Verdict? The cheesecake looked gorgeous and wasn't too hard! But otherwise mine tasted mostly like unflavored gelatin. However, if you actually follow the recipe correctly, I think you might get better results. I'd try it one more time if blueberries go on sale again. Bonus: I really liked using oatmeal in the graham cracker crust. I'm going to do that from now on!

Blueberry cheesecake #2 is the baked kind. The bf was not impressed with the no-bake variety (not that I can blame him), so I went back to something a little more traditional. This one was actually a lemon-blueberry cheesecake with a blueberry sauce. I liked it a lot more! (But that may be because I didn't screw this one up too much.) I used the same delicious crust from the no-bake cheesecake, and from there on, I followed this recipe from this incredibly talented teenager whose calling in life must be pastry chef. Bonus: the blueberry sauce was amazingly easy. Did you know it only takes 3 ingredients and a few minutes to make a delicious fruit sauce? I'm about to put fruit sauce on everything now! French toast? Grilled cheese with brie? Vanilla sorbet? Hellz yeah! This berry sauce technique might be the most useful thing I learned in the last 3 years. (Sorry law school.)

The final step in all cheesecake making is, obviously, to enjoy. Repeatedly.