In August nobody has the will to turn on an oven. Which is exactly why the no-bake cheesecake is the dessert that solves the entire summer season - you make it the day before, it sits in the fridge and comes out finished when guests arrive.

The base is always the same, and that is where the first mistakes happen. Two hundred grams of biscuits, well crushed, and ninety grams of melted unsalted butter. The mixture has to be compact but not greasy - if it releases oil when you press it with the bottom of a glass, you have used too much butter. Press it firmly into a tin of twenty to twenty-two centimetres and give it thirty minutes in the fridge while you make the filling.

The filling calls for 500 grams of cream cheese, 250 millilitres of double cream at 35 percent fat, one hundred grams of icing sugar and three sheets of gelatine, that is six grams. Soak the gelatine in cold water for five minutes, heat the milk without letting it boil and dissolve the squeezed-out gelatine in it. Here is the step where most people fail: the mixture has to cool before it goes into the cheese. If it is hot, threads of gelatine form through the cream and the texture is ruined beyond repair.

The cream cheese is beaten with the sugar until smooth - and it does not come straight out of the fridge, because ice-cold cheese will not come together. The cream is whipped to soft peaks, not stiff, and folded in gently with a spatula, not a mixer. At least six hours in the fridge, and ideally overnight.

From there you have three directions. With forest fruits - around 200 grams of jam warmed slightly so it spreads more easily, strained if you want a perfectly smooth layer, cooled and then spread evenly. With lemon - sixty millilitres of fresh juice and the zest of one lemon in the filling itself, plus a top layer of water, juice, sugar and two more sheets of gelatine. With chocolate - eighty grams of dark chocolate melted together with the butter in the base, and one hundred and fifty grams of milk chocolate in the cream.

The combinations that work with cheese are lemon, forest fruits, vanilla, chocolate, coffee and tropical fruit. What does not work is too much sugar or too much liquid - in both cases the mixture will not set properly, and the blame afterwards gets thrown at the gelatine.

The cream cheese can be swapped for mascarpone, ricotta or fresh cheese if you want a different flavour, but the proportions stay the same. And the last thing no recipe states loudly enough: a cake you cut after three hours is not a finished cake. Patience is half the recipe, and it is also the only ingredient you cannot buy.