Strawberry Lemonade Cheesecake

This idea started at a bithday party, I was approched by a friend who told me one of their favorite things to do with lemon bars, which I should note were being served at the party, is to pair them with cheesecake. I thought "hmm, lemon bars and cheese cake, that sounds like a pretty good combination." and then I thought, "Wait a second why not make a lemon bar cheese cake!" so I started trying to work it out in my head.

My first thought was that when I combined these two dishes it would end up tasting more like a lemonade rather then just lemon, and while that sounded good I wanted to make it a little bit more dynamic, also I wanted something to make it look cool, cause lets be honest, who wouldn't. Enter strawberry sugar glass. Alright to be compleatly honest I had an alternetive motive for the sugar glass, I have been wanting to play with it for a while and this seamed like a good oprotunity, we will talk more about the stuff latter because, well, it's awsome.

I knew the sugar glass on its own would not add enough strawberry so I added some ot powdered sugar and blended it to make strawberry sugar for the topping. I did end up making a syrup though because the strawberry still wasn't as strong as I wanted.

When it came to actually making the custard it was pretty simple, I combined the shared ingredients, added the egg custard ingreadients for the lemon bars and took out one packadge of cream cheese from the cheesecake to make room, and voila!

Instead of the traditional grahm craker crust I chose to use a shortbread crust, mostly to pay homage to the now canablized lemon bars, and because its delicious! The crust also helped elivate this a little from other cheese cakes, its intresting, its fun, it has great colors. It's smooth enough to folow any meal, while also being bright and light enough that you don't feel as guilty afterwords.