I’ve finally learned to love baked cheesecake

I used to be a baked cheesecake sceptic: I didn’t feel they were worth the effort when other cheesecakes required you simply to stir together some ingredients and bung them in the fridge. My thinking was: why waste your time? Was the result really worth the extra effort?

In turns out that yes, it was. It is. I just hadn’t ever eaten a really good cheesecake.

That changed on a visit to San Sebastián. La Viña is a small bar and restaurant serving pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), but it is best known for its ‘burnt’ baked cheesecake. Inside, you feel as though you’re in a cheese shop that has recently suffered a fire: the walls are lined with shelves on which sit rows of cheesecakes, slowly cooling in their charred baking-parchment wrappers. These cheesecakes are crustless, or rather, the baked cheese mixture forms a kind of crust. They are mottled brown on the outside, like Portuguese custard tarts, and slightly sunken in the middle.