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| Pineapple Cheesecake |
This was the first cheesecake I tried with my own recipe and it's still one of the favorites. It's probably what I would have made for mom since her birthday is this weekend..if I had been here. First time in four bloody years that I'm not in college and I can be home for her birthday, but now I can't - because of some dumb as hell visa complication, and the fact that this country will make your life difficult just to do so (that's how it feels anyway), I have to leave the night before her birthday and miss it. The first time I made this cake and everyone loved it I was oh-so-unbelievably proud...it was the first time I baked and I'm not really sure why I did it at all. I told mom i wanted to learn how to cook for college, and she said well sure but why don't you bake a cheesecake, ask Sohni (one of my best friends ever and the most amazing baker in the world) for her recipe. Actually, I guess the first time I really baked was a bit disastrous - it certainly was a cheesecake but due to the lack of philadelphia cream cheese that the recipe called for (those were the days it wasn't available anywhere), the cream cheese was so dense, the cake felt like it was attacking your insides. After struggling past a mouthful and deciding I had no reason to be polite to myself and chucking the rest in the bin, I decided to figure out a method to thin it...sour cream worked like magic. So the first successful cheesecake was the one above. Now that my blog has been completely taken over by fairly unattractive photographs of these goods, I feel like the recipes should be shared.
The base I use for all my cheesecakes is pretty much the same. Much of this came from my friend's recipe, but several things were tweaked to comply with the harsh conditions (poor Mihi) of my current home.
Crust:
- Roughly 10-15 sugar cookies
- 3-4 Tablespoons melted butter
Filling:
**All these should be room temperature, so make sure you give the cream cheese and sour cream some time to warm up before adding them**
- Roughly 6 oz cream cheese
- 1/3 cup sugar (or Splenda)
- 1 egg
- 4 oz of sour cream
- ¼ cup flour
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 tsp lemon juice
Directions:
Crust Directions:
1. (Pull out filling ingredients so they can warm up from fridge while you do this). Pulse cookies until crumbled completely. Depending on what you want here, I add coconut shreds (after crushing them completely) to the lemon cheesecake, and once in a while I throw in some chocolate / chocolate chip cookies for a slightly different flavor. Crushed nuts add a nice flavor too. Mix in butter so when you make a fist the cookie crumbles hold together, grease pan then press onto bottom and up the sides of the pan a bit; sometimes I get lazy and don't bother going up the sides, it doesn't matter much. You can also throw this in the oven for a few minutes before putting it in the fridge if you like, but I've noticed this doesn't make too much of a difference either, so I usually put it straight in the refrigerator while making the filling.
Cheesecake Directions:
*Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit*
1. All the filling ingredients should be at room temperature i.e. cream cheese and sour cream.
2. Beat the cream cheese until light and fluffy with an electric mixer set on low.
3. Add the sugar a little at a time and continue beating until creamy.
4. Add one egg at a time and beat after each egg.
5. Add flour, vanilla and lemon juice, mix well. For the chocolate cake, I skip the vanilla essence.
6. Add the sour cream and beat well.
This is the basic batter. From here it depends on what type of cake you're making. For the lemon cheesecake, I add more lemon juice and grate some lemon zest into the batter. For the pineapple, I strain crushed pineapple pieces (haven't seen fresh pineapple here ever), chop them up and mix those in. For chocolate, I melt semi sweet chocolate chips and any chocolate bars around the house and stir those in; I add a tiny bit of milk to help stir it in easily. I tend to add some Hershey's chocolate syrup too, mostly for the fun of it (who doesn't love pouring syrup into things?). For berry I grate some lemon zest in, and prepare the berry filling on the stove (see below)then swirl that in - pour a bit, mix with a knife, keep repeating till you get a cool-ass texture that people find impressive.
8. Pour your cream cheese mixture into the crusted (ew, that sounds pretty gross, but you know what I mean) pan.
9. Place in the oven until the sides look baked and the middle isn't completely set. Just jiggle it a bit, but basically the edges should look done. A lot of recipes say you need a pan of water and such shenanigans, but until I'm opening a bakery this works pretty well. The cheesecake continues to set/cook in the fridge/after you take it out of the oven so don't worry about it.
10. Remove from oven and let cool, then refrigerate for about 24 hours to get the full effect. Seriously, cheesecake is always better after about 12 hours minimum...I know what I'm talking about, don't test me bitches.
Strawberry marble filling: defrost frozen berries and puree (I use about 6-7 frozen blackberries and that's usually enough). Add about 1/4 cup of sugar (taste to make sure it's sweet enough as the berries can be very strong in flavor), tablespoon of corn starch and a bit of water, put it over stove and let it bubble till it's thick, then cool. Mix into the cream cheese mix, one layer cream cheese then dots of swirled berry (with knife) repeatedly.
*DISCLAIMER! Actually, it more of a claim, no dis nor er. Anyway point being: I use Splenda instead of sugar for most of my recipes as my mom is diabetic. The berry was the most effective at hiding the sweetener aftertaste that sometimes pokes it's nasty head through, since the flavors of both the berries and the lemon zest were strong enough to mask that subtle too-sweet-almost-tastes-like-poison flavor. The above measurement work for sugar too though, since every time I bake for a party or someone else I use sugar.
