No Bake White Rabbit Candy Cheesecake Recipe

This no-bake White Rabbit candy cheesecake recipe is heaven for everyone who grew up on these candies. And since this Chinese New Year is the Year of the Rabbit, this is the perfect time to enjoy them.

With origins in Shanghai, White Rabbit candy (大白兔奶糖 Dàbáitù Nǎitáng) is a creamy, milky, chewy candy wrapped in edible rice paper – that's the translucent, delicate stuff you'll see around the candy once you take off the printed (inedible) paper wrapper. The sweet itself starts off a little hard, but softens as you chew. The milky flavour lends itself well to a White Rabbit cheesecake.

For my White Rabbit cheesecake recipe, I made a simple shortbread biscuit base using a rough 3:2:1 icing sugar to butter to flour ratio, and used two different moulds to make the 'grass' and the rabbit. Because my rabbit moulds were quite small and my round ones were whole individual dessert-sized, I just filled a third of the round ones for the rabbits to sit on top of, making perfectly-sized individual desserts.

You can use any small moulds you like, or one bigger one. To make my White Rabbit cheesecakes, I used 60mm round silicone moulds for the base and a standard silicone mini rabbit mould for the tops. This yielded six individual desserts in total.

You don't need to use cocoa butter 'flocking' or velvet spray to finish your cheesecakes, and you can just leave them white and smooth. But I quite like the colours and fuzzy effect, which make the dessert look like fluffy bunnies sitting on grass. I've used  Perle Velour and Deco Relief brands of flocking spray before. I prefer the latter, because you don't have to heat it up in hot water first and it produces a fuzzier effect. But I also found that the nozzle is a bit less controlled with Deco Relief, so it takes a bit more practice with spray pressure and distance to get the desired effect.

Make this dessert the day before you want to eat it, as you'll need to freeze your cakes before taking them out of their moulds.

You can also watch me make these on YouTube:

Ready? Let's go.

(Makes six mini White Rabbit cheesecakes.)

Ingredients for Biscuit Bases:

1/2 tbsp icing sugar
1 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
Pinch of salt
1.5 tbsp plain flour (plus a little more if needed)

Ingredients for No-Bake Cheesecake:

5g (about 1 tsp) gelatin
2 tbsp cold water
80ml double cream
100g White Rabbit candy (weighed removing the wrappers)
150g cream cheese
10g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
100ml more double cream

To Decorate (Optional):

Coloured cocoa butter spray

Method:

1. First, make the biscuit bases. Preheat the oven to 180°C and line a small baking tray with nonstick baking paper.

2. Stir the icing sugar, butter, salt and flour together, switching to using your hands to knead until you have a smooth dough. If it's a bit sticky, add a little more plain flour, kneading it in a little at a time, until you have a pliable dough.

3. Roll the dough out relatively thin – about 2mm thick – and stamp out six small circles. Make sure the circles are a little smaller than your round base moulds. You may need to gather up scrap dough and re-roll it out again to get six in total.

4. Place your circles on the baking sheet and bake for about six minutes, or until lightly golden on top. Leave to cool completely.

5. To make the cheesecake mixture, sprinkle the gelatin evenly over the water in a small bowl, and leave to soak for a couple of minutes.

6. Meanwhile, melt the 80ml of double cream and White Rabbit candy together in a small saucepan over a medium heat, stirring continuously. Stir in a third of the cream cheese, and take off the heat,

7. While the White Rabbit mixture is still hot, stir in the soaked gelatin until melted and well combined. Leave to cool until at room temperature.

8. Whisk the rest of the cream cheese with the sugar and vanilla extract, and then beat in the remaining 100ml double cream until thickened. Fold in the cooled White Rabbit gelatin mixture.

9. Spoon the cheesecake mixture into the six mini rabbit moulds, and then divide the rest evenly between the six small round moulds (they should only fill about a third of the way up of the round moulds). Place a biscuit on top of each of the round moulds. Freeze both the rabbits and round cakes for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

10. Pop the frozen cakes out of their moulds onto a large, foil-lined tray, taking care with the delicate bunny ears as you pop them out. Place the round cakes biscuit-side-down. Make sure the foil is raised around the edges of the tray to help prevent mess for the next step, but before you continue, pop the tray with the cakes in the freezer for another 10 minutes.

11. Spray the round cakes with one cocoa butter colour, and the bunnies with another colour. Then, using an angled spatula to avoid touching and melting the cocoa butter coating, place a bunny on top of each round cake.

12. Pop the frozen White Rabbit cheesecakes in the fridge to thaw for at least two hours before serving and eating.

Enjoy, and have fun.