A no-bake cheesecake to match the weather forecast

No surprise, it's summer. And, no shocker, it's hot.

When it's a hot summer, at the end of a special summertime meal, I want an easy-to-make, cool dessert for my guests who haven't totally wandered off a healthy eating path. In search of one, I found a no-bake cheesecake recipe on one of my favorite foodie websites: seriouseats.com.

Stella Parks' no-bake cheesecake recipe (it even includes "Easy" in the name) seemed simple enough, and she uses top-notch ingredients, that for this learn wizard, were too high in fat and sugar; simple, but not as step-on-the-scale-friendly as it could be.

Wondering whether I could make this an all-organic cheesecake, with fewer calories, I headed off to my local natural food store to see what I could find. Fortunately, I could even find organic graham crackers for the crust and organic lower-fat cream cheese for the filling. Because the recipe requires whipped cream, there was no workable substitution for that; I had to go with the real deal.

The easiest substitution was trading organic stevia, a natural sugar substitute, for the 3/4-cup sugar. That switch trimmed nearly 600 calories off my cheesecake.

Parks' cheesecake recipe specifically calls for "full-fat" cream cheese; delivering 10 fat grams per ounce. I went with Neufchatel cheese, which is nearly identical to cream cheese in color, texture, and flavor, except that it has one-third less fat (6 grams versus 10) and fewer calories (70 versus 103).

With all my ingredients ready, I proceeded to make Park's recipe following the instructions exactly; using the paddle attachment on my stand mixer for the cream cheese mixture and then switching to the whisk attachment when adding the whipping cream.

For the first 30 seconds, the whipping cream blended smoothly with the Neufchatel cheese mixture and looked thick and creamy. However, when I proceeded to " ... whip until the mixture can hold stiff peaks, 3 to 5 minutes ..." as the recipe required, the mixture got soupier instead of thicker. That was disappointing and mystifying.

Parks wrote: " ... refrigerate until the filling is firm and cold, about 6 hours with an internal temperature of 40 degrees F." Blaming the soupiness on the warm room temperature (it's summer) I believed with some certainty that my cheesecake experiment would firm-up once chilled.

Simply put; it didn't happen.

Well-chilled, I tried to cut what would have been a slice, and only the top 1/8-inch was firm, the rest was still ... um ... soup. Drat. It tasted great, and the stevia flavor was invisible, but I'd have to serve it in a bowl.

Back to the store and then the kitchen with more supplies and a different path. I decided that I would need to make the filling in two distinct steps. The first step: blend the cheese and flavorings with the paddle in one bowl until just combined. Next, in a separate, well-chilled bowl with a well-chilled whisk attachment; make whipped cream. Then gently fold the whipped cream into the cheese mixture. It worked, it looked light and creamy. When chilled, although a touch soft, the pie filling held together nicely and tasted amazingly good without ever turning on an oven.

My substitutions trimmed a total of 1,061 calories (88 calories per serving) and 52 fat grams. Give it a try.

• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@ theleanwizard.com.