Halloween recipe : After Eight Graveyard Cheesecake #AfterEightBakes

We love After Eight Mints here at The Madhouse but I must admit, I'd never thought of incorporating them into our baking. That's what After Eight challenged us to do though, sending through a lovely recipe for a baked cheesecake, along with all the ingredients that we'd need. I gave it a bit of a Halloween twist to make a spooky graveyard scene !

 After Eight Graveyard Cheesecake

Ingredients:

120g digestive biscuits (I used up some homemade cookies)

300g pack of After Eight mints

50g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

700g light cream cheese

150g caster sugar

200ml reduced fat soured cream

3tbsp plain flour

4 free-range eggs

2tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 150°. Crush the biscuits with a rolling pin. (I used up some homemade peanut butter cookies that were lingering in the tin.) Melt the butter and mix in the crumbs. Press into a lined and greased 23cm cake tin and bake for 10 minutes. Leave to cool.

For the remaining ingredients, I reduced all quantities by half and there was still plenty. Beat together the cream cheese and sugar, then mix in the flour and sour cream. Finally, gradually beat in the eggs and vanilla essence, bit by bit, stirring in between each addition.

Pour into the biscuit crumb base.

Lay out the After Eights on top. I laid out half on the top of the cheesecake ...

... and cut the edges off the rest to make tombstones, which I wrote RIP on with a gel icing pen. (These will go on the top of the cheesecake after baking.)

Bake the cheesecake for an hour then leave to cool in the oven (this stops the top cracking). When completely cool, chill in the fridge for half an hour then stand up the After Eight tombstones by pressing them into the cheesecake topping vertically. Make sure it is completely cold or the chocolate will melt and they will fall over !

Disclosure : We received a delivery of ingredients to take part in the baking challenge.