Who doesn't love a good cheesecake around Christmas time? And believe it or not, one of the most important parts of a good cheesecake is the crust.

the quick brown fox

I'm going to show you how to make a really simple sweet crust that works perfectly on cheesecake.

It's also good for caramel slices but not for pie all sorts of things. I'm using ginger snap biscuits and dump the whole lot into there.

Okay.

So once you're pretty happy that you've got that to a nice fine crumb, you can then add the rest of you dry ingredients, a little sugar and a little ginger.

Just give it a quick turn so you know that it's evenly distributed.

Then it's time to add your melted butter. So I've got half a cup of melted butter. You just slowly add that.

Now what you're looking for is that it resembles wet sand.

Squeeze it together and it should really hold itself. The same sort of consistency as wet sand.

Perfect. Once your crumb's thoroughly mixed, just pick it up, go ahead and pop it into your cake tin and then we're going to build up the sides and then finish off the base of the cake as well.

So I literally just push it around and then just start working it into the sides of my tin.

I always do the sides first.

You're looking for about half a centimeter in thickness. Now if you're having trouble working with it, if you're finding it's too crumbly, pop it in the fridge for 10 minutes and that'll just help the butter to set up and make it a little easier to work with.

The biggest mistake that people make when they do a cheesecake is they end up with these big thick edges.

You know what I mean right down in the bottom. So it is really important to make sure that the entire side of the cheesecake is perfect and perfectly straight.

So the way to do that is just do what I'm doing now, pushing it into the side and then you can go with a parry knife, a small knife like that and you can kind of just brush off anything that looks too thick.

So you get in at nice and even using a knife.

See how I'm just working that around? So it's better to start with thicker walls and then you can always trim them down.

And if they're too thin to start, then that's going to be really difficult. I put some cocktail sticks here because you might want to use one of those just to sort of gently pierce it at some point and see how thick it is.

See that is going to be too thick. So by using the cocktail stick you'll see that and you can say, okay, let's get in thicker at the bottom and that's not what I want.

So I'll go and scrape a little bit of that out.

If you want a perfectly even top, you can do the same thing. Just gently go around and just sort of remove anything that is uneven.

Just really gently with your knife. Totally unnecessary. It's just a presentation thing if you're into it.

And then of course it's time to do the base. So you just go ahead with the excess and start pushing that down so it's nice and firm.

If you don't want to use your fingers, get yourself a little glass like this. Everyone's got one of those and you can just sort of push that in.

Make sure it's nice and even on the base as well.

So once you're comfortable that it's beautifully even around the outside and the base as well, you're literally ready to cook in it.

It's a delicious crust and it's buttery and fantastic. So all you need to do now is go and make your cheesecake.