No-Bake Mint Cheesecake

Mint leaves: making nature kind of worth the hassle

For a long time, I considered no-bake cheesecakes to be in the same classification of hipster-nonsense as waxed moustaches, drinking gin out of mason jars, and judging others for not living a "sustainable" lifestyle while you yourself are living off of a trust-fund. Not much has changed. All right, maybe it's changed a little bit. It takes forever to set up in the fridge. That's a lot of free time. Which can totally be used by unemployed hipsters practicing their ukelele solos for the open mic next week, but can also be used by people who have actual jobs, and not that much free time. Given the right preparation, this can totally be the dessert version of a crockpot dinner. Just get it going in the morning, and enjoy it when you get home at night. I, for one, am totally in favor of taking the hipster nonsense and using it against them like that. Now I just need to find a productive use for kale.

Ingredients:

16 oz. Cream Cheese, softened (You "soften" cream cheese by letting it get to room temperature. You do this so that your cheesecake doesn't have gross lumps running through it, causing your friends and family to rightly shun you at all social gatherings)
14 oz. can Sweetened Condensed Milk
2 pouches Graham Crackers 
1 cup Mint Leaves
1 cup Sour Cream
1/2 cup Unpacked Light Brown Sugar (Typically, brown sugar is measured in one of two ways. "Packed," meaning you measured it out and then smashed it down to take up less space for no discernible reason, and "unpacked," meaning you decided that just measuring it out once like a normal person was all you had time for today)
1.3333333333 sticks Butter
The juice from 1/2 a lemon
Free time

The first thing you're gonna need to do is get rid of that uneasy feeling you have in the back of your brain about making a no-bake cheesecake. I get it. Theres something vaguely unsettling about a cooked food that you don't actually...well, cook. But fear does not exist in this dojo, so get over it. Now that your existential worries have been quenched under a torrent of repression and cautious optimism, take out those uncomfortable feelings on your graham crackers by crushing them in to tiny bits as a warning to the other ingredients. Mix in your brown sugar, and then get to melting your butter. Add your melted butter in with your sugar and the crushed bodies of your graham crackers, and stir it all together. Take about 2/3 of your mixture and dump it into a springform pan (A springform pan is essentially a pan with a clasp that you can release to loosen the sides and take it off. If you don't have one, you can use a pie tin and things will still be mostly ok. But your parents may not love you anymore. I don't make the rules, I just dispassionately inform you about them). Pack down your graham cracker sugar sand into a firm layer along the bottom, and throw that sucker in the fridge while you work on your cheesecake guts.

Bonus points for failing to slice all the way through the crust,
making it impossible to the see the bottom crust deliciousness

So this next part is gonna be complicated. You ready? Ok. Take the rest of your ingredients and...mix them together. Sure, you've gotta choppity chop your mint first, and if you want to make your life easier you'll start this whole mess by mixing the sweetened condensed milk slowly into the cream cheese before adding everything else in. But that's really it. Just mix it all together. Then take your crust out of the fridge, slap that mess on top of it, and top it off with the rest of your graham cracker mix. Then throw that sucker in the fridge for...a long time. I mean a long time. At a conservative estimate, I'd say 2 presidential administrations. You will check on it multiple times, and each time be shocked that it's not ready yet. I just warned you about it, but you will still do this. Eventually it'll set up, and it'll be solid enough to cut pieces of and eat pretty much like a real cheesecake. And it kind of is a real cheesecake. Or, at the very least, an extremely thick milkshake. Enjoy!