Question: Why did it take me so long to get to 16-2: Cheesecake (especially since cheesecake is one of my favorite foods)?
Answer: Technically, I’ve made it once before–when I lived in my first REAL apartment during college (20 years ago…YIKES). I’ve talked before about my cooking misadventures while in college (I went to a high-altitude school, which messes with baking more than you think), so we’ll take my note below in stride.
OK–why so long to make it again, then?
I held out on this one for so long because I wanted to make it with real dairy–the vegan/fake stuff was never going to do this cake justice. It’s not even a particularly GREAT cheesecake (Junior’s version is the one you want for that–I even won my work cheesecake “throwdown” with that one), but I wanted to at least try to do it right.
Dietary “needs” have recently evolved, so real dairy is back on the menu after many years of using substitutes. In honor of that, let’s give this one another try now that I’m closer to sea level and have 20 additional years of cooking experience behind me.
Note their alternative crust flavorings that they mentioned on the cover card (not on the TIPS portion of the backside like normal). 8 ounces doesn’t seem like a LOT of cream cheese compared to most cheesecake recipes, but we’ll go with it.
Ingredients. I couldn’t find graham cracker crumbs (they keep rearranging my local Safeway as part of a remodeling effort), so I’ll make my own out of full-size crackers. I debated on whether to get the cinnamon or the honey ones, but went with cinnamon to give it an extra “spicy” boost.
I normally would have splurged and gotten real crème fraîche for this instead of settling for sour cream, but I needed sour cream for another recipe I was making that week, plus given the aforementioned Safeway issues, who knows if they’d even have it.
Crackers ready to be crumbed in my mini-processor.
It got most of them–I took care of the last remaining big chunks by eating them. 🙂
Measuring out the crust ingredients.
After mixing together. You know, I think this might have even been the same pie pan (on the right) that I used to make this the first time, 20 years ago. It was one of the first ones I picked up on my own for my (very small at the time) kitchen collection–probably from the local Safeway I’d frequent back in Boulder.
Funny how some things change in life, and some things stay the same.
My attempt at a crust.
Whipping the egg whites–I broke one of my yolks, but at least I got them separated.
It doesn’t tell you how much to whip the eggs–stiff peaks? Soft peaks? Who knows? I went with stiff-ish peaks.
Again, this doesn’t feel like enough cream cheese for a true cheese cake. This feels more and more like 80s-90s “diet” cheesecake in disguise.
It’s essentially cream cheese frosting.
Right before folding in the egg whites (which were chilling in the fridge while I was working on the cream cheese “frosting”). I did NOT take my suggestion about cutting down the amount of lemon juice–let’s try it again as intended, for science.
After folding in the egg. I put a sheet pan (and silicone mat) under the pie pan and got ready to pour in the filling.
Not bad–it didn’t overflow, and I probably could have even gotten it cleaner had I not slopped it up the side a bit at the end while scraping out the bowl. Gave it a little swirl with the spatula to even it out and popped it in the oven.
After baking. Looks pretty good! I let it cool for a while (they don’t say HOW cool) before I put it back in.
Spreading out the sour cream.
After baking. I think I let my cake cool too much before glazing–my sour cream stayed as more of a cream layer than turned into a glaze. I cut it into 12 pieces so I could get the calorie count down to about 200 per piece, and then I’ll freeze them individually as easy-to-eat (and defrost) desserts.
Side view after extracting a few pieces. Not as fluffy as they advertised, but still has more height to it than I expected.
The individual pieces, arranged on a sheet pan (with mat) and ready to freeze) I “par-froze” them for about an hour uncovered, and then took them back out, wrapped each piece in plastic wrap, and then put them back on the pan and in the freezer to finish freezing through. That way I could freeze them wrapped without them actually sticking to the wrap.
One of the pieces we had fresh for dessert that night–gotta try at least ONE piece fresh, right? It was pretty good–reminds me of the frozen ones you get at like a sushi buffet. Gets the job done (it’s hard to find BAD cheesecake), but it’s definitely still no Junior’s. Not sure the Golden Girls would have fully approved.
Now that I think about it, it was a bit lemony…so if you want it to be less on the lemony side–go with my note from 2005. Maybe it had nothing to do with altitude after all.
Grade: B+
