No Bake Lime Cheesecake with Salted Ginger Crust, Kiwi & Mango

Lately I’ve been thinking about waiting. Do you ever wonder how much time you’ve spent… waiting. For your life to happen, start, begin.

About how, so often, we don’t perhaps realize that we’re even doing it. Sometimes waiting is the lie we tell ourselves… maybe I’ll be ‘happy’ when I’m smaller. I’ll be the magical unicorn of “health” if I eat this one way. Maybe I’ll not feel shame if I achieve this very specific thing. Perhaps I can let go of the past once ten years are up because shouldn’t I-be-over-it-already.

But every time I made myself wait, I was wrapping myself in those lies. As armor, as a barrier to happiness that I didn’t think I deserved, because I always made it contingent on Some Other Thing. Because if you’re the one building the wall, layering up the bricks, filling the gaps with cement… well, at least it’s your own partition, right? At least if you built it yourself, you know it’s gonna keep other people out and you safe.

Eventually, though, that wall isn’t safety. It’s the tomb you bricked yourself into – like your very own Poe tale – because you were scared. But when you’re only adding a brick at time, it doesn’t feel permanent until you lay that final slab and realize that the darkness is complete. And now? Now, you’re alone, on one side of your self imposed wall. And instead of keeping others out… all you’ve really done, is separate yourself from your self. The you that you truly want? You’re going to have to punch through that brick to go get her. Because as much as you’ve been waiting for change… the part of you that you hid from out of fear? She’s had that change – she’s been the change – you wanted all along.

It’s not the change that I had to fear, in the end. It was the wasted time, waiting, for something I (could have) had all along. Myself.

What are you waiting for? What if… you stopped?

What if, instead… you raised that fist? And punched?

I stopped waiting for permission to eat, to enjoy, to create. And it worked out pretty well in the end, because, I mean, look… there’s cheesecake, obviously. No bake lime cheesecake, no less.

For so many years of my life, I was terrified by the idea of eating fat. I mean, it’s not that surprising considering I could count calories before secondary school and grew up in the prime “fat is the dietary devil” phase of conventional dieting dogma. So cheesecake was never really on my radar.

But in a twist of irony, the one thing I did gain from an elimination diet was freedom from traditional dieting rules, go figure.

So while these days I don’t hang out with dairy, it’s just because I don’t do so well with it, not because I’m fearful of the fats like I used to be.

Which means that I didn’t hold back with this no bake lime cheesecake recipe. It’s rich and decadent even though it’s dairy free. And unlike a lot of “coconut cream + gelatin = unfortunate milk jello” dessert experiments, I’ve used a perhaps-strange but totally-works surprise ingredient here to thicken things up a little and give this cheesecake just the right type of density that I’ve found other dairy & nut free recipes to lack.

Yes, I said this is also nut free!

This no bake lime cheesecake has a classic coconut cream base (you want to use something like this with a higher fat percentage and steer clear of anything marked as a “beverage”) that I blended with fresh lime juice and infused with even more lime zest for extra zing.

While the fresh lime juice and zest brings the punchy citrus that you want in anything lime flavored, the extra glorious verdant color comes from adding a smidge of matcha green tea powder. The amount you’ll want to use will vary according to the matcha you have, since some are brighter than others. Just add it a little at a time until you’ve got a pretty spring-like green. It won’t take much and it doesn’t actually affect the flavor, so adjust it to your preference.

Typical AIP or paleo cheesecake recipes will usually use a base that’s a blend of squishy dates and coconut for some down and dirty no bake action, but I didn’t want to do that here, because I didn’t want my no bake lime cheesecake to taste overtly coconut-y.

That might sound strange given how much coconut cream there is in this recipe, but that flavor doesn’t really come through because of how strongly the lime flavors infuse into the cheesecake filling. So, instead of using chewy and obviously coconut flavor, well, coconut, I made my cheesecake base with some classic thick cut, salted plantain chips. Once they meet a food-processor-y fate, they are blitzed into something resembling graham cracker style crumbs and their saltiness is a lovely counterbalance to all the natural sweetness of the date base.

Now, back to the aforementioned secret ingredient! I borrowed a little trick from my vegan friends here. Kind of. You know how many vegan cheesecake recipes are actually thickened up and made cheese-like by using blended, soaked cashews?

I wanted to keep this recipe nut free, but I thought… why couldn’t that technique work with something else? Unsweetened banana chips (like these, with no added flavorings or weird stuff) taste of exactly nothing, but they’ll soften and blend up nicely. I’ve actually used them in the past in this way, like in my Salted Caramel Date Shake recipe, where they thicken without flavoring the ice cream like texture. So, here, they work in the same way to give some denseness without sweetness, lending themselves to the task of making a dairy and nut free cheesecake-a-like.

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