Key lime cheesecake...

Thanks to a Feather Princess guild member, I came home from Tampa last week with 10 freshly picked key limes! The feather princesses told me that 10 is the magic number of limes when planning key lime goodies, something I didn't know. These key limes look a lot different from the tiny, hard, green key limes that I always find at the grocery store. They were yellower, bigger, thinner-skinned, and very juicy. You can see four of them in the photo. They look more like little lemons.

I decided to make a key lime cheesecake with my key limes on Monday. The kids were coming for dinner on Thursday and it would have time to chill by then. I found this recipe at about.com. It is gluten-free which is important at my house. My daughter-in-law and grandchildren can't have gluten. I substituted gluten-free gingersnaps for the graham cracker crumbs in the crust and I think they added a lot of flavor to the cheesecake.

This cheesecake raises a lot during baking. The top of mine got browner than I prefer. When I make it again I'll lower the rack in the oven and I'll check it more often. If it gets this brown again I'll be ready to put some foil over the top of it to protect it better.

My plan was to make this cheesecake and not eat any of it. That's always my plan with cheesecake. I know what's in a cheesecake which keeps me from eating it. But Steve came home for lunch on Tuesday, the cheesecake had chilled overnight, and we decided to each try a little bit. Big mistake! This was possibly the best cheesecake I've ever made! By dinner last night (Thursday) the cheesecake was almost half gone - as you can see in the photo above. (I should have taken a photo before I cut it, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time.)

I have to tell you that as I ate my (multiple) slivers of cheesecake, I was smiling! All leftovers went home with Christopher and Lorna so today at lunch I'll just dream of cheesecake...

Becky