This recipe for a rose mascarpone cheesecake tart with mixed berries and fresh mint will make you the easiest no bake cheesecake made with cream cheese and mascarpone, flavoured with rose for a taste of the Middle East, generously topped with mixed berries — summer berries or winter berries, depending where you are — and garnished with fresh mint leaves. Make this showstopper the centrepiece of the table. I guarantee it will brighten any day.
Looking for an impressive dessert for a family meal, casual gathering or weekend picnic? Try my rose mascarpone cheesecake tart recipe for the easiest no bake cheesecake. Made with a simple old-fashioned cheesecake base (use a store-bought base if time is tight), a fuss-free cream cheese filling, and glorious fresh berries, it’s gorgeous to look at and tastes sublime — especially if you’re not a fan of sickly-sweet cheesecakes.
A tart is more elegant than a cake, and a cheesecake tart is the perfect vehicle for fresh fruit, and this is all about the berries. Buy the best quality fruit you can find and afford and be generous. Serve with bowls of double cream or whipped cream for dolloping, a shaker of icing sugar (or set a small sieve or sifter on the table), and a dish of fresh mint — or candied rose petals if you can source them or have time to make them.
Having said that, this cheesecake tart is endlessly adaptable: make a larger cake instead of a tart if feeding a crowd, flavour with jasmine instead of rose (or go classic vanilla), top with a mix of citrus segments in winter (sub rose essence for lemon curd), stone fruit in summer (stir apricot jam into the creamy filling), or mango, pineapple and passionfruit for a taste of the tropics (add coconut cream to the mixture).
The biscuit crust is made to a traditional recipe. Australian cooks have been making cheesecakes since Australians began milking dairy cows. Cheesecake recipes appeared in Australia’s earliest cookbooks, including The Colonial Cookbook published in 1864, which I have, through to the classic 1970s cookbooks of Margaret Fulton (Australia’s Julia Child). There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. Time-poor? Use a store-bought base.
And if you’re looking for more sweets or dessert recipes with berries, please try my recipes for Scottish cranachan with whiskey, honey, oats, raspberries and cream, sweet varenyky with berries for Ukrainian dessert dumplings, and an easy French toast with berries and whipped cream.
Now before I tell you about this mascarpone cheesecake tart recipe, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by supporting our Cambodian cookbook and culinary history project on Patreon; or buying a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; booking a cooking class or meal with locals on EatWith; or buying something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks.
Looking for more cooking inspiration? We’ve got hundreds of recipes in our archives from around the world from places we’ve lived, worked, travelled, and loved. Don’t forget you can save your favourite recipes in a private account by clicking on the heart on the right of the post. Now let me tell you all about this recipe for rose mascarpone cheesecake tart with mixed berries and fresh mint.
Rose Mascarpone Cheesecake Tart Recipe with Mixed Berries and Fresh Mint
I’ve been meaning to share this recipe with you for over a month, but life got in the way. I made this rose mascarpone cheesecake tart with mixed berries and fresh mint for Mum’s birthday in May, on Mother’s Day. We savoured it over several meals and each time I cut slices of this beauty, she brightened our day.
Yes, that means I’m still in Australia, still caring for Mum following her cancer treatment, and still dealing with Mum’s housing insecurity during a nationwide housing rental crisis. I began making no-bake cheesecakes last year for Mum’s birthday, the first birthday we’d celebrated together in years, so I wanted it to be special.
We love our cheesecakes and had cheesecake cravings. My grandmothers made cheesecakes. And I made cheesecakes when I was a kid going through a baking phase — back in the days when mothers were expected to bake cupcakes, caramel slices and lamingtons for school fete bake sales.
As Mum was very much a career woman, commuting from the suburbs to the city every day, and Dad got home from work earlier, we baked together. We made coconut ice, meringues, chocolate crackles, and toffees coated in colourful hundreds and thousands. I was always proud of our cake stall contributions. They made up for the fact that Mum didn’t volunteer at the tuck shop. Working mothers were not the norm back then!
So I decided to make a cheesecake instead of a baked cake for Mum’s birthday. But I couldn’t find a fuss-free, quick and easy cheesecake recipe, so I obsessed over developing the easiest no-bake cheesecake recipe that I could use again and again — both for sweet and savoury cheesecakes. Yep, I have another cheesecake recipe to share.
As regular readers know, in the 15 years since we started Grantourismo, Terence and I have mainly shared savoury recipes here. On our yearlong global grand tour dedicated to slow, local and experiential travel that launched Grantourismo, I we only shared two sweets recipes during the entire 12-month trip: chef Jordi Artal’s Catalan chocolate after-school snack and Terence’s soft centred chocolate cake made in Costa Rica.
Ever since, if we’ve posted sweets recipes, they’re usually my Russian-Ukrainian family recipes or recipes for desserts Terence and I have loved from places we’ve lived and travelled that we’ve really wanted to share, dishes we’ve had a connection to, such as these sweets recipes from Southeast Asia, our home since 2011, or this Scottish cranachan recipe, a Burns Supper favourite we didn’t end up sharing in Edinburgh, which I made last year.
When it comes to sweets, our thinking has long been that there are so many dessert recipes out there, we need to have a good reason to add more here. And that’s why I’m sharing this no bake mascarpone cheesecake tart recipe. I’d wanted a quick and easy fuss-free cheesecake but I couldn’t find a recipe that fit my brief. If I was finding it challenging to find a super-simple but impressive cheesecake recipe, and I do this for a living, I figured some of you must, too.
So what was my brief? I wanted a stunning homemade cheesecake for Mum’s birthday, but I was cooking up a Russian-Ukrainian feast so I didn’t want to add a baked cake to my to-do list. The spring weather was still warmish, another reason not to bake. Berries were in abundance, affordable, and I already had punnets in the fridge. That meant I needed a recipe for an easy no-bake cheesecake I could top with berries.
Both my grandmothers made cheesecakes when I was a kid. Mum’s mother, my baboushka, made a traditional Russian baked cheesecake with raisins called ‘tvorog zapekanka’, made with ‘tvorog’ or ‘farmer’s cheese’, which was like a firm ricotta or hard cottage cheese. Baba served it for breakfast rather than dessert. It was wonderful with black lemon tea. But, as I said, I didn’t want to bake.
Nanna made the kind of cream cheese-based cheesecake that’s become an Australian classic, so much so that most supermarket cheesecakes are in that style. I bought one of the most iconic Australian cheesecake brands to try; it was the first time I’d tasted it in decades and found it sickly sweet. That was the problem with a few recipes I tested; they were far too sweet. Mum agreed.
I also thought vanilla was, well… vanilla. Boring. I’ve been missing the food of the Middle East, a region where Terence and I lived, worked and travelled for almost a decade — hence the Middle Eastern recipes we love to share. Mum and I had been recalling the addictively delicious drinks with rose syrup I made when we lived in Abu Dhabi and how I attempted to bring the rose syrup back to Australia for her (confiscated!). That explains the hint of rose.
Here are some tips to making our recipe for a rose mascarpone cheesecake tart with mixed berries and fresh mint.
Tips to Making this No-Bake Mascarpone Cheesecake Tart with Rose, Berries and Fresh Mint
This is the easiest no bake cheesecake recipe if you prefer homemade to store-bought, a more elegant tart to a cake, and summer berries are in abundance and affordable where you are — although they’re currently ‘winter berries’ here in Australia, where strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries are still available, as they’re grown all over. I’m calling them ‘mixed berries’.
This easy mascarpone cheesecake tart recipe really couldn’t be easier. Make it a few times and you won’t even need to look at this recipe again. I remember my grandmothers making cheesecakes without consulting recipes.
And, as I discovered, the more cheesecakes I made, the less I needed to look at a recipe, and could substitute and adjust ingredients and measures without impacting the end result. No-bake cheesecakes are far more forgiving than baked cheesecakes, so don’t worry and get creative.
The Ingredients
Here’s what you need, starting with the base, then the filling and the fruit.
Biscuit Base or Biscuit Crust
A classic cheesecake biscuit base or biscuit crust is made with digestive biscuits, crumbly wheat and wholemeal biscuits. I tried a few brands, including Arnott’s Granita, which is popular, but I prefer the plain McVities Original Digestives. Our American readers use Grahams Crackers, which I haven’t spotted here.
Cream Cheese Filling
Most cheesecakes are made with cream cheese, which is usually combined with another dairy product, such as cream, sour cream, yoghurt, ricotta, or condensed milk. I use cream cheese and mascarpone, an Italian acid-set cream cheese made of full-fat cream. It’s softer, richer and creamier than cream cheese, but firmer than thickened cream.
No Sugar
This is a note about an ingredient excluded rather than included: sugar. My preference is always for sour over sweet. I dramatically reduced my sugar intake when I returned to Australia, cutting out sugar wherever possible and leaving it out of recipes whenever I could.
I rarely eat sweets. I’ll choose sour cream over cream and never add sugar to whipped cream, as I prefer the flavour of pure cream. (I’m the granddaughter of dairy farmers.)
Nearly every cheesecake recipe includes sugar. For sweetness, we would assume, but some cooks claim it’s for texture. But I found no difference in texture by excluding sugar from this no-bake cheesecake recipe.
Rather, it tasted creamier than sweet. If you like a sweet cheesecake, you’ll want to add a teaspoon of a fine-grained sugar such as castor sugar.
Rose Instead of Vanilla
Along with sugar, vanilla is a classic cheesecake ingredient. I went with a little rose essence instead. The rose syrup I introduced Mum to years ago, which I used to use to make rose lemonade, drizzle on ice-cream and stir into milk and cocktails, would have over-powered the flavours of the fresh fruit.
I’d use a teaspoon of rose syrup if I wasn’t piling berries on top and instead was sprinkling candied rose petals on the cheesecake. If you’ve not used rose essence before, less is more. Rose water won’t work. But jasmine essence is lovely.
The Mixed Berries (or Other Fruit)
My mixed berries include strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. Berries are available year-round here in Australia. They’re nearly always delicious, only the price changes. I’ve found berries are cheapest here at the end of summer and early spring, when there seems to be a glut. Although when the price is too high and nobody is buying $8 punnets of blueberries, they’ll reduce them.
Use whatever fresh fruit you prefer and affordable, unless it’s a special occasion and you’re happy to splurge. I tried a mix of stone fruit in summer (apricots, peaches and nectarines) and citrus segments in early winter. When I get back to Terence in Cambodia, I’m making a tropical cheesecake with mango and pineapple.
The Process
Here’s a quick rundown of the process if you’re making a cheesecake for the first time, otherwise head to the recipe.
The Base
The first thing to do is make the cheesecake base. As I went with a cheesecake tart over a cake, I used a 2.5cm high x 20cm round non-stick fluted pan, also called a fluted quiche pan or fluted flan pan. You’ll want a pan with a loose removable base, also called a springform pan.
My Mum had a 20cm pan and it’s perfect, but I note a lot of recipes call for a 22cm or 9 inch pan. Use what you have and simply adjust the ingredients for the base. I sometimes have a little leftover biscuit crumble, which I freeze. If you make a larger cheesecake, you’ll need a higher pan and need to double the cream cheese filling.
Use a blender or food processor to blitz the digestive biscuits into a fine crumb then transfer that to a mixing bowl. Or, do as my grandmothers did, and use a rolling pin to crush the biscuits in a plastic bag.
Melt the unsalted butter in a small frying pan or microwave, pour it into the bowl, and stir it into the crumbs. That’s your biscuit base. Too easy.
If you want to flavour the biscuit base, add a teaspoon of cinnamon, an inclusion in a ‘Refrigerator Cheesecake’ recipe in a 1970 edition of the Australian and New Zealand Complete Book of Cookery.
Press the crumbly biscuit base into the bottom and sides of the pan, and slide it into the fridge. Even better if you have space, freeze it for 15 minutes or so.
A tip: if you’re really tight on time, you could use a store-bought cheese cake base or flan base. But if you’re making this for a special occasion, make sure you’re using a base you’ve tested. I’ve tried a few and not all bases are equal. Some taste like a classic biscuit base, others of cardboard.
The Cream Cheese Filling
Next, make your cream cheese filling. The mascarpone should be cold, but make sure the cream cheese is at room temperature and soft. Clean the blender or food processor you used to blitz the breadcrumbs and blend the cream cheese, mascarpone and rose essence until well combined and smooth. It won’t take long at all. I’ve even beaten it by hand.
Taste your cream cheese filling, and, if needed, adjust the flavour to suit your palate. Add a little more rose essence if you like, but take care; not everyone is a fan of floral flavours.
If you change the fruit, the rose flavour might not work, so you’ll want an alternate cream cheese filling flavour. Stir a teaspoon of apricot jam through the mixture if you’re using stone fruit, or lemon curd or marmalade if you’re going with citrus segments. For a tropical cheesecake, I’d add the dense creamy top of a can of coconut cream (don’t shake it before opening), or a teaspoon or two or passionfruit pulp.
A tip: if the fruit isn’t perfect or you have leftover berries, you could use them to make a super-quick syrupy fruit sauce called pyatiminutka (five-minute sauce/jam), which I love to drizzle over French toast with summer berries and Ukrainian sweet varenyky with summer berries.
Assemble the Cheesecake Tart
Use a spatula to evenly spread the cream cheese filling around the chilled biscuit base and smooth it out on top. Once you’re done, you have options: arrange the berries on top as you like then slide the cheesecake tart into the fridge to chill, for a minimum of five or six hours to properly set, overnight.
To Serve
When you’re ready to serve, remove the fluted ring and carefully slide the cheesecake onto a serving plate. Garnish with fresh mint leaves and set your beautiful berry cheesecake tart at the centre of the table, or picnic blanket. When it’s time for dessert, slice her up and serve. Or let your guests help themselves.
Having lived in Southeast Asia for so long, where every table has a condiments tray, I love letting guests customise their food. Serve this cheesecake with a jug of good pouring cream and/or bowls of whipped cream and/or double cream for dolloping; a shaker with fine holes filled with icing sugar, or pour a little icing sugar into a small sieve or sifter and set it on a small plate; and a dish of fresh mint leaves or candied rose petals.
Rose Mascarpone Cheesecake Tart with Mixed Berries and Fresh Mint
Ingredients
- 185 g digestive biscuits - processed into fine crumbs
- 90 g unsalted butter
- 250 g cream cheese - room temperature
- 250 g mascarpone cheese - room temperature
- 4 drops rose essence - or 0.05ml, or to taste
- 125 g strawberries - washed and dried
- 125 g blueberries - washed and dried
- 125 g blackberries - washed and dried
- 125 g raspberries - washed and dried
- 16 fresh mint leaves - or as many as you like
Instructions
- Using a blender or food processor, blitz the digestive biscuits into a fine crumb then transfer them into a mixing bowl. Or you could use a rolling pin to crush the biscuits in a plastic bag.
- In a microwave or pan over low heat, melt the butter, pour it into the bowl and stir it into the biscuit crumbs to combine well.
- Transfer the biscuit base to a non-stick 20cm x 2.5cm fluted quiche tin with removable loose base, press it into the bottom and sides, and freeze for 15 minutes or so.
- Clean the blender or food processor, blend the cream cheese, mascarpone and rose essence until smooth, then use a spatula to evenly spread it around the chilled biscuit base and smooth it out on top.
- Arrange the berries on top as you like, slide the tart into the fridge and chill, preferably overnight or for a minimum of five or six hours to properly set
- When ready to serve, remove the fluted ring and carefully slide the cheesecake onto a serving plate. Arrange the fresh mint leaves on top, slice, and serve.
Nutrition
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make my recipe for a rose mascarpone cheesecake tart with mixed berries and fresh mint, as we’d love to hear how it turns out for you.
love this, Lara! totally agree no need to reinvent the wheel, which is why I don’t read many blogs except for yours. my shelves are full of the old cookbooks from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Not only Margaret Fulton. love Jill Dupleix, Stephanie Alexander, Neil Perry and all those groundbreaking chefs. can’t wait for you two to do a cookbook. please do one before I die! H
Hi Helen, so nice to see you here :) And so pleased you agree. I also have cookbooks by Stephanie Alexander and Neil Perry — and Luke Nguyen and Christine Manfield, and… I almost threw out all of Mum’s old Margaret Fulton cookbooks when I returned early last year and began sorting through all her stuff. But so pleased I didn’t. I’ve been cooking a lot of those old recipes, and not only do they take me back in time, but they work! And they’re often so simple. I personally think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily complicated these days. But then I’m reminded that a lot of people weren’t taught to cook as kids as our generation was, so there’s that. Still pitching cookbook proposals. My dream is to be able to mail you a copy :) Look after yourself, Helen!