While I’m not from a cheesecake family — it is never unwelcome, but we are more deeply devoted to things like pastry creams, chocolate pudding, and stellar coffee cakes — I married into one, which means that even though this site’s cheesecake archives are very well-populated, not a single peep of protest could be heard as far as my apartment walls reach (to be fair, a short distance) as I tinkered with these bars over the last few weeks.
It doesn’t hurt that they’re as pretty as the explosion of peonies that co-starred in this week’s photoshoot. They remind me of tie-dye, marble countertops, and wisps of smoke, yet require no cheffy brilliance to pull off — just a bag and a toothpick. But unlike baked goods where a flawless veneer makes me suspicious they’ll overpromise and underdeliver, these taste like the best of everything: a gently lemony, perfectly creamy, dead simple cheesecake layer swirled with a sweet-tart puree on a buttery graham crust. Or, a berry and cheese danish formatted as a picnic/potluck/party-ready bar. I hope you get to make them (or get someone to make them for you) as soon as possible.
Cheesecakes, previously: Easy Basque Cheesecake, Cheesecake Bars with All The Berries, New York Cheesecake, Cappuccino Fudge Cheesecake, Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake, Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake, Brownie Mosaic Cheesecake, Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake, Key Lime Cheesecake, Layered Mocha Cheesecake, Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake, and Pumpkin Basque Cheesecake
Video
Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake Bars
- 1 cup (110 grams) graham or digestive cracker crumbs (about 7 sheets of grahams)
- 2 tablespoons (25 grams) granulated sugar
- Pinch of salt
- 3 tablespoons (45 grams) unsalted butter, melted
- 6 ounces (170 grams) fresh or defrosted frozen raspberries
- 2 tablespoons (25 grams) granulated sugar
- 2/3 cup (130 grams) granulated sugar
- 1 pound (2 8-ounce or 225-gram packages) cream cheese, at room temperature
- 3 large eggs
- Finely grated zest and juice (1 to 2 tablespoons) from half a medium/large lemon
Crust
Swirl
Cheesecake
Line bottom and sides of an 8×8-inch square baking pan with a large piece of parchment paper pressed into the corners and up the sides.
Make the crust: Combine crumbs, sugar, salt, and butter in a bowl with a fork until evenly mixed. Press firmly into the bottom of your prepared pan. Bake for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, make raspberry sauce for swirl: Process raspberries with sugar in a food processor or blender until smooth. Pass puree through a fine sieve into a small bowl and discard the seeds. Set raspberry sauce aside.
Make the cheesecake: Beat cream cheese with sugar until fluffy, then beat in eggs, one at a time, until thoroughly mixed, scraping down the sides and bottom of your bowl between each addition. Beat in lemon zest and juice. Pour cheesecake batter over the prepared crust (still warm from the oven is fine). Food processor method: Place sugar, then cream cheese (cold is fine here; cut into chunks) in work bowl of food processor and blend until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, scraping bowl down between each. Add zest and juice and blend, scraping again.
Assemble: Transfer raspberry sauce to a squeeze bottle, piping bag, or a zip-lock bag with a tiny corner snipped off, and squeeze raspberry sauce into the cheesecake batter in two ways: First, pressing the tip into the batter to deposit raspberry in the lower half of the bars (essentially making “underwater” blobs of raspberry sauce all over) and then placing droplets all over the top surface. [Tips: Use all of the sauce, even if it seems like a lot. And don’t worry if it’s runny or makes a mess. It’s impossible for this not to come out pretty!] Use a toothpick or skewer to swirl the raspberry sauce decoratively. Transfer bars to the oven.
Bake the bars: For 40 to 50 minutes, or until the cheesecake batter jiggles just a little when the pan is shimmied. Let cool on a rack for 15 minutes, then transfer to the fridge to chill the rest of the way.
To serve: Use the parchment paper to carefully lift the cool bars out of the pan and onto a cutting board. Cut into 16 squares. Swipe the knife clean between each cut for neatness. Dipping the knife into water can help too.
Do ahead: Bars keep in the fridge for 5 to 7 days.
Previously
6 months ago: Baked Potatoes with Crispy Broccoli and Bacon
1 year ago: Challah French Toast
2 years ago: Black Bean and Vegetable Bake
3 years ago: Hash Brown Patties
4 years ago: Snacky Asparagus
5 years ago: Spring Asparagus Galette
6 years ago: Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Cabbage
7 years ago: Cannellini Aglio e Olio
8 year ago: Fig Newtons and Crispy Tofu Pad Thai
9 years ago: Granola Bark
10 years ago: Caramelized Brown Sugar Oranges with Yogurt and Potato Pizza, Even Better
11 years ago: Why You Should Always Toast Your Nuts (Please!) and Obsessively Good Avocado-Cucumber Salad
12 years ago: Dark Chocolate Coconut Macaroons and Baked Eggs with Spinach and Mushrooms
13 years ago: Spinach and Smashed Egg Toast and Bee Sting Cake
14 years ago: Over-the-Top Mushroom Quiche and Banana Bread Crepe Cake with Butterscotch
15 years ago: Blackberry and Coconut Macaroon Tart
16 years ago: Baked Kale Chips and Almond Macaroon Torte with Chocolate Frosting
17 years ago: Artichoke-Olive Crostini and Chocolate Caramel Crackers
18 years ago: Spring Panzanella and Lemon Yogurt Anything Cake
19 years ago: Arborio Rice Pudding and Gnocchi with a Grater
This looks lovely and like a must for our upcoming graduation party. Is it 1-2 tablespoons lemon juice and zest, or each? Thank you – many of your dishes and desserts will be featured to celebrate my daughter.
It’s the zest of the half lemon *and* whatever amount of juice there is from that half, estimated 1-2 T.
Thanks for the recipe! I hope your graduation party is wonderful. These cheesecake bars are sure to be a hit!
Must be cheesecake season lol I just made the black bottom cupcakes today!
Check out the flower prairie smoke (geum triflorum). That’s what these remind me of!
Is it possible to use raspberry jam instead of the raspberries and sugar? I have a mostly unused jar in my fridge at the moment!
I didn’t test it with jam, but it could work. My favorite is a mixture of mashed raspberries and jam, but it will have seeds.
Raspberry jam would have a lot more sugar – jams are usually half sugar and half fruit by weight. The raspberry puree here just has a bit of sugar and is mostly fruit. It might come out too sweet with the substitution.
Checking if I have all these ingredients right now!
The Nordstrom Rack ad covers up the ingredients.
I just want to thank you for using the term “sheets of graham” crackers. You’ve solved the problem found in other recipes of how to count graham crackers for a recipe. Looking forward to trying this!
FYI, you have written “8×8” rectangular pan
Fixed now, thank you.
You were right the first time, Deb, although the edit is also correct. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. And 8×8 pan is absolutely a rectangle!
Ha, thank you.
My husband made this for Mother’s Day but the texture doesn’t seem right. Almost curdled? Not a nice smooth cheesecake texture, like some of your other cheesecake bars we make annually. Is there a trick to adding the lemon to the dairy?
These look delicious! But I think there is an error in the butter amount for the crust. I think 85g of butter comes out to ~6T. Which is the correct amount? Thank you!
Maybe Deb has already corrected this but I am seeing 3 Tablespoons (45 grams) butter in the crust recipe, not 85 grams/6T.
Other cheesecake recipes on the site use similar/same proportions of butter to cracker crumbs. (For instance, Cheesecake Bars with All the Berries uses twice the amount as this recipe, for roughly twice the pan volume. This one is 8×8 the All Berries is 9×13).
The precise math depends, I suppose, on your butter. Ours is labeled at 113.5 grams/stick/8 tablespoons. That would make it 14.2 grams per tablespoon or 42.6 g for 3 Tablespoons and 85 grams for 6 Tablespoons. But I don’t think the fractional gram distinctions are going to make a whit of difference here. You just need enough melted butter to make a “wet sand” crust that holds together.
I read over this at my desk yesterday and realized I hadn’t made a cheesecake bar in years. Fast forward to afterwork, I’m in the produce section of the grocery store and I keep looking at the raspberries; needless to say, I pulled up the recipe on my phone and began impulse buying cream cheese. I used your chocolate cheesecake filling from the layered mocha cheesecake recipe (I just took a third off of everything) and added the raspberry swirls. Not this recipe exactly, but it was great!
I made these today. They are still in the oven, so I can’t vouch for how they turn out, but I do want to share a word of warning.
I used a piping bag without any tip to put the raspberry sauce in, and it poured right on through. Luckily, I’d positioned the bag over the pan of cheesecake before I started loading the raspberry sauce in, and so the swirls are less intentional and less all over than planned, but there was not a horrible mess in my kitchen.
I saw the recipe and knew my family would love it. I made it today and we cut into it slightly too soon because we just could not wait any longer. It was delicious even with the slightly squishy texture. Assuming my 20-something son doesn’t eat it all overnight, I’m excited to try it fully cooled tomorrow. I used the plastic bag-cut corner approach for the raspberry sauce, and didn’t have much control over where it went. It didn’t matter. The swirl worked beautifully.
Any thoughts on frozen sour cherries in place of raspberries? Tartness is a virtue in this kitchen
@Svetlana, not exactly an answer to your question, but commercial jams are always way too sweet for me, so I mix about half a teaspoon of citric acid {available in most health food stores because you need it to grow sprouts at home} into the jar when I open it.
What fruit would you recommend as a substitute for the raspberries? Can’t find kosher (bug free) raspberries… Would blueberries work?
I have these in the oven right now and the technique for straining raspberries would work well with any store-bought preserve/jam.
I made these for my sister’s birthday and they were a huge hit! Totally stole the spotlight from the chocolate devil’s food cake. Everyone loved how light and fluffy they were and we thought they were the perfect balance of sweet and tart.
Also, they were so simple to make – I was able to throw them together while my babies napped! I ended up making the whole thing in three rounds in the food processor. First made the graham cracker crumbs; wiped it out and made the cheese filling while the crust baked; poured the filling into the crust, gave the food processor bowl a quick rinse, and made the raspberry sauce. Definitely adding these to my repeat dessert roster.
I just these last night as a mother’s day gift for a friend. (Lemon and raspberry are her favourite flavours, and she adores cheesecake, so I expect she’ll be pleased.) I can vouch that this is DIVINE after having tasted the bits that stuck to the knife when I cut bars. How can something this easy be so pretty and delicious?
Hi. What good be a good sub for raspberries?
Any berry would work here, really. Blackberries would be stellar in this, especially if you upped the lemon slightly with them. Strawberries are delightful, blueberries, whatever.
If you have an aversion to all berries (I can’t tell why you’re asking), you could use apricot jam that you’ve warmed up so it’s pourable and it’d be really nice.
Hey, cheesecakes this week – any chance they’re for Shavuos??
Made this for Mother’s Day and followed the recipe as written. This turned out amazing! The amount of fruit is perfect. Mine baked for the full 50 minutes resulting in beautiful browned edges with a smooth creamy center. The husband and son are cheesecake people. They both gave this rave reviews. I am seeing many more of these in my future! Thanks for a delicious recipe!
I made these for Mothers Day. They turned out fantastic even after I made the mistake and bake at 375. Oops. I made with strawberries instead of raspberry. Sooo good.
Would this work with blueberries or cherries, do you think? We are moving soon and I am trying to clean out my freezer.
I made these and they were very tasty, but I”m not sure the extra effort to puree raspberries and squeeze and zest half a lemon was worth it (for me.)
But they were very tasty…
A good seedless raspberry jam (jelly?) works here.
Has anyone had luck making these in a different size pan? I have a 9×9 square, a glass pie plate, a loaf tin, and several springforms… but no 8×8.
A 9×2 round cake pan holds the same volume at the same depth (127 cubic inches volume and 128 inches cubic inches in volume, respectively) .
A 9×5 loaf pan also holds the same volume (8 cups) but at a deeper depth. If you put the batter in a 9×5, it would be at a depth of 2.75 to 3 inches and less width across the pan, so the center may not bake by the time the long edges are starting to get dry.
A 9x9x2 square pan holds about 25% more volume than a 8x8x2 (10 cups v 8 cups, or 162 cubic inches v 128). If you used the 9-inch square, you’d have thinner bars (by 25%) and would most likely need to reduce the baking time.
The ads takes over full screen on my phone over the story and recipe. There is no way to exit. I had to open a new browser to post this. If your traffic drops, maybe this is why.
Apologies. We’ve blocked it several times over the last week and it keeps slipping in. We’re on it!
This is tasty, and very pretty. My hot tip to anyone thinking of making it is that when Deb says to snip a “tiny corner” off the plastic or piping bag holding the raspberry puree, she means TINY! That stuff pours out really fast, and I almost had a hot pink disaster on my hands :))
Delicious! I admit that I could not be bothered to pipe in the raspberry sauce; I just poured it all in and swirled it around a bit. Still unbelievably tasty and a big hit!
I made this two days ago with changes based on what I had on hand
Crust = pretzels and pecans instead of graham
Gel- added lime juice
Cheesecake- lime zest and juice (had no lemons)
Everyone had seconds! So good- gave a bit of a lite key lime vibe. Will make again!
Thank you Deb!
Made these to take to a friend’s house last week exactly as written and wow they were good. Friend was like “ahem… moment of silence for the cheesecake” 😂 I could see blueberry being just as delish. Prob blend and strain out skins yeah?
Glad they were a hit! For blueberry, you might want to make a quick sauce on the stove first so it’s that nice inky blue/purple color. A little cornstarch to thicken, then blend it smooth.
just put these in the oven and gotta run out to buy more parchment paper before whipping up a chocolate basque cheesecake next – thanks for often sharing a new cheesecake recipe a few days before shavuot, my cheesecake-holiday-loving friends and I are very grateful!
Hello! I made this like the recipe and was amazing, added more lemon zest and lemon juice (guessed the amount but it was lemon juice of one lemon) because I am obsessed with tart lemon!
I am wondering however, can I use passion fruit instead of raspberries? I have frozen passionfruit! thank you!
Of course! It might not be as visible but it would be delicious.
Made this with biscoff cookies for the crust – this was amazing and also so beautiful. Let my 18 month old lick the spoon after making the raspberry puree – she loves it too!
My four year old loved the raspberry sauce too!
I used the zest of the whole lemon and the remainder of the other half of the juice in the raspberry puree! I also added a bit of maple syrup to the puree. I didn’t strain the seeds as my blender crushed most of them.
These were absolutely amazing and I will make them again and again. Thanks Deb!
I made this yesterday and felt it was a lot of steps and didn’t look the prettiest – the results today are fantastic. I will make this again. My notes for next time:
* raspberry puree – I used frozen raspberries because the fresh ones at the store were so sad. I added a little bit of lemon juice to the puree because it was sweet but I think the sugar needs to be there to help it gel. I used a stick blender to puree and didn’t bother straining it after. I used a plastic bag with the *tiniest* hole cut in the corner based on other comments. I would use a plastic piping bag next time. When adding the puree to the base of the cheesecake – put the tip in a lot lower than you would think. I have berry puree in about the top half of the final product.
* crust – I will skip the sugar here. I’m not sure it did anything and the overall dessert is a touch sweet
* cheesecake – next time I’ll try 1/2 cup of sugar instead of 2/3 cup
* I used a 9″ x 7″ pan because that’s what I have – I baked it close to 60 minutes at 325 till I got an internal temp of about 170F – 180F in spots. I bake cheesecakes till 165F usually. It looked jiggly still but based on internal temp I pulled it out.
I’ve made these twice this week, they are that good! I followed the recipe, and used Honey Maid special edition salted caramel graham crackers for the base, and it really took this dessert over the top! Also, I noticed a few comments saying hard to control the pouring of the raspberry sauce – so I did it in two steps. Added half the sauce to my zip-lock bag to do the blobs under the cheesecake filling, and then added the other half to do the droplets on top. It worked out great.
I made these for my husbands birthday last week- they were so easy to make, especially using the food processor method, and came out so pretty and delicious. Sadly, I forgot to take a photo and they were gone by time I remembered…