Limoncello ricotta cheesecake

What have you been doing this long Easter weekend? We had friends over for the Easter lunch, and enjoyed good company and good food. And whenever I had a chance during these four days, I was escaping to the kitchen to listen to the Classic FM's Hall of Fame. Last year we were in Italy for Easter, and I missed it.

For Easter lunch with friends I baked a limoncello and lemon ricotta cheesecake, and my sons helped to decorate it with  Milky Bar and Smarties Mini Eggs.
It's the first time I made a cake with gluten free digestive biscuits (one of our friends is a coeliac), but they worked perfectly well as a base for a cheesecake.

Limoncello Ricotta Cheesecake
Ingredients:
150g digestive biscuits (I used gluten free digestives)
60g butter, melted
120g caster sugar
zest of 1 lemon
4 medium eggs
50ml limoncello
250g ricotta
280g cream cheese (Philapdelphia Original full fat)
Mini eggs for decoration, dipped in melted white chocolate

First you need to bash the digestives in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. Combine the biscuit crumbs with melted butter, and press at the bottom of the spring cake tin, lined with parchment paper and lightly oiled.
In a deep mixing bowl beat together sugar, lemon zest and eggs. Add the limoncello, ricotta and cream cheese. The cheese mix will be quite liquid. Pour the cheese mix over the crumb base.
Bake in the oven preheated to 180 C for about 50 minutes.
Let the cake cool completely before placing in the fridge to set, for a couple of hours or overnight.

Decorate the cake, when it's cold. Dip the mini eggs into a melted white chocolate and set around the top of the cake.

I used a mix of ricotta and cream cheese, but it could be swapped for just two tubs of ricotta or two tubs of Philadelphia.

Milkybar and Smarties Mini Eggs were one of the seasonal products in the latest Degustabox. It's a sharing bag of milk and white chocolate eggs in a sugar shell. A serving of 5 mini eggs contains 85kcal and 10.8g of sugar. They look pretty and colourful, and were a perfect Easter decoration.
No wonder, my guys went wild with decoration. I thought they would add just a few mini eggs in the middle, but they had the other ideas.

We always end up with more limoncello than we manage to drink, and I told my husband he should stop bringing it from his trips to Italy.
Adding this recipe to #KitchenClearout linky at Cheryl's Madhouse Family Reviews blog. I will be glad to see the end of that limoncello bottle, and will need to come up with more recipes to finish it off.