Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake with Total Greek Yoghurt

When Total  Greek Yoghurt asked me to take part in their recipe challenge I was delighted. I am not a food blogger, but I love to cook, and I love Total, and have been purchasing it ever since it arrived in the UK.

Toral have released 1000 recipes using Total Greek Yoghurt and are running a Treasure Hunt to celebrate. There are 30 recipes in total, across different blogs. All you have to do is find as many as you can to be in with a chance to win £800 worth of kitchen equipment. More details and how to enter are at the bottom of my post.

I chose the Choclate Swirl Cheesecake and was sent all the ingredients to try it out.

I have made a few cheesecakes in my day and the recipe made me a little nervous. I've made two types, a baked cheesecake and set cheesecake with gelatine. This only had yoghurt, cream cheese and a little bit of icing sugar so I was a little worried it might end up a gooey mess.

Resisting the urge to add a leaf or two of gelatine, I stuck precisely to the recipe.

First of all I introduced the biscuits to the food processor.

Then added the melted butter and agave nectar (more about this later) and popped it into the bottom of my springform tin (ungreased)

 

Now for the star of the show Total Greek Yoghurt. Now if you've never used it before Total is very different than Greek Style Yoghurt. It's very thick and creamy, think a cross between whipped cream and double cream with much less fat. 

I popped the whole carton of yoghurt in, together with the cream cheese and icing sugar into my beautiful Kitchenaid and gave it a good whipping.

 

 And then spread the luscious thick topping onto the base.

 

 Finally under the watchful eye of my sous chef I added the chocolate swirls.

                                 

 

After a day in the refrigerator here is the end result, which came out of the tin perfectly.

 

The cheesecake was absolutely divine, however here are a few pointers.

• The Lyle Chocolate Syrup was the wrong product to use for the topping. I knew it would be as I buy this for Joseph. It wasn't rich enough or thick enough, so it formed a coating rather than ripples and didn't contribute to the flavour. When I make this again, I will make my own chocolate sauce with 100grammes bittersweet chocolate and 200 mls cream.
• The agave nectar wasn't required. I never sweeten a digestive biscuit base and found this unnecessary. However if omitting it you will need to add a little more sugar to the cheesecake mix.
• The recipe states that if feeds eight. What it means is it feeds 8 Tasmanian lumberjacks. For a family of four I would use a smaller tin and half the mixture. 
• I am dying to play with the recipe. One of my favourite recipes is a Turkish Delight Cheesecake which is a fiddle and a half, and I am going to try and modify this recipe. I also think a chocolate ginger version would be divine, or lemon ripple with lemon curd on the top. 
• This is a perfect recipe, in particular the filling, as there are no eggs, no gelatine, and its so easy to make. It will most certainly become a regular in my repertoire.  

Total have hidden away 30 TOTAL recipes on 30 different blogs across the web. Can you find them? If so, you are in with the chance of winning Paul Merrett’s Ultimate Chef’s Kit, worth over £800. On the tab you'll find clues leading to 10 of the hidden recipes and over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting additional clues on our timeline to help you find the final 20. The more recipes you find, the more times your name goes into the draw and the more chances you have to win! The recipes are part of our brand new recipe collection 1000 Ways to Love your TOTAL.  To take part go to the app on thek Facebook page.