This Adventure in Cooking had a longer timeline than any before, and it was worth the wait. It's so delicious it needs no further introduction (or maybe that's because the painfully descriptive title says it all!), so I'm going to be like no food blogger ever and jump right to the recipe!

Mini cheesecake with lemon curd topping and a gingersnap crust

Prep time: 1.25 years

Cook time: zero minutes

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 1 lemon tree + 1/2 Tbsp lemon zest
• Some gingersnaps you got from a Christmas cookie exchange
• 1 8-oz box cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• Sugar, Butter, Eggs, you know, all the usual suspects when it comes to making a delightful dessert

Instructions

The Lemon Curd

1. Start with a lemon tree. You'll probably want a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, because you want to be able to pluck those juicy ripe fruits right from the comfort of your living room in the middle of a January blizzard. You'll want to acquire this tree about a year and a half in advance, because you'll need time for it to flower, nearly die from overwatering, flower again, produce lemons, and ripen said lemons before you can move on to step two. Which is...
   
2. Harvest 2 lemons from your indoor lemon tree.
   
3. Use aforementioned lemons to make a mouth-watering lemon curd. Now, I know you can probably make lemon curd in your sleep, but if you have forgotten some of the steps, you can use this handy recipe. It is a little known fact that if you follow a recipe to the letter, the creativity gods will smite you, so make the following changes:
   1. Grate both of your lemon peels until they are limp as wet rags, but still be short by an entire half tablespoon of lemon zest (that's half the required amount)! Now you're faced with a dilemma: you can either harvest your last remaining lemon, grate its peel, and still be short 1/4 tablespoon, plus have a naked lemon to deal with; or you can top off the tablespoon with the dried lemon peel you always keep in the pantry. It really is no contest, but you should spend an inordinate amount of time deliberating before choosing the second option.
   2. Decide to use up the old pats of butter you pilfered from restaurants over the past month, rather than carefully measuring out your butter like some kind of square. Three single-serve pats and a big old slice from Cheesecake Factory oughta do it!
   3.  At least one more change of your own, to appease the creativity gods.

The Cheesecake

No-bake cheesecake is one of my favorite treats to have at the ready when I get a sugar craving. It's so easy to make, and there is no limit to the things you can top it with. I make this stuff on the regular, so believe me when I say I have pro tips!

1. Open the can of condensed milk and pour about 1/3 of it into the bowl of an electric mixer. This step is important to do first, because it will prevent the cream cheese from sticking to the bowl and failing to blend.
   
2. I hope you did allow your cream cheese to warm up to room temperature, because this will also enable it to mix more effectively. Another pro tip is to use real cream cheese, not the low-fat or neufchâtel variety. While those are very tasty and indistinguishable from full-fat cream cheese in most applications, in this recipe, they will remain gritty and produce a thinner mixture. Add the cream cheese, in small chunks, mixing with the electric mixer the entire time. I like to use the "cake mixes" or "cream" settings for this, which are medium speeds on my mixer.
   
3. Once all the cream cheese has been incorporated, drizzle more condensed milk into the mixture until it has reached your desired level of sweetness. It is possible to make this recipe using an entire can of condensed milk, but you get a thicker filling and less of a hit to your blood glucose if you hold back some of the milk.
   

The crust

No judgment if you like to eat your no-bake cheesecake straight out of the mixer bowl (it's that good!) but if you want your creation to resemble a proper dessert and have an additional layer of texture and flavor, then you should give it a crust.

1. Start with a slightly disappointing neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. Now, you're no master chef, but even you know the difference between a burnt cookie and one that's fit to give as a gift. When you bust your butt making buckeye bars (one of your favorite desserts!) and give them all away, you hope to get something of comparable value in return. Not—just as a hypothetical example and not a real-life one, naturally!—3 different varieties of overcooked cookies and a baggie of "Soft Chips Ahoy." To be fair, there were some real winners in this cookie exchange of yours, but among them, the gingersnaps were not. They were a little bit tough, if you're being perfectly honest. While tough cookies are not a joy to bite into, they do make a decent pie crust.
   
2. So deposit one on your cutting board or crushing surface of your choosing, and
3. Have at it with a rolling pin! One cookie makes a nice crust for a single-serving  cheesecake, but you can feel free to crush all of them at once and make a full-size pie.
   

The assembly process

1. Spread a layer of crushed gingersnap into a bowl or pie plate.
   
2. Spread several healthy dollops of cheesecake filling over that.
   
3. Top it all with another healthy dollop of lemon curd!

This Insta-worthy dessert (Sorry, I still have not earned my food photography badge, but it really can be pretty if done right!) tastes even better than it looks! The best news is you'll have tons of lemon curd left over, so you can really knock the creativity gods' socks off when you come up with other things to do with it (and share them with me, please)!

This is one Adventure in Cooking that cannot be categorized, in even a small way, as a misadventure!