WEEKENDhospitality: Cheesecake

From Eric:


Cheesecake is such an easy dessert to make but such a difficult one to master. For me, cheesecake was the first dessert that I ever created my own recipe. My dad loves peanut butter so one night I decided to play around with different peanut butter filled items: Reese's pieces, peanut butter chips, peanut butter, etc. I had noticed that the afore mentioned cheesecake cookbook had certain ratios of cream cheese, eggs, etc so I decided to try my ratio and it turned out perfect! 

Ever since then I have tried time and again to create the "Great Cheesecake."

I never repeat a recipe that I've made before, mostly because I can never remember what I've done previously. I never write down my recipes, I know the ratio and just add other ingredients as I see fit. I've made Pumpkin, Chocolate Swirl, Plain and many other variations. 

This week I went with my normal Plain recipe and it was all going well. I had to use cereal for the crust, which as one friend explained was kind of like a cookie. I used my food processor to get the right consistency of crust (Cheerios and Special K). I mixed in my desired flavors, vanilla, cloves, freshly ground nutmeg, butter, salt, sugar and placed it all into my springform and baked it. 

 After cooling I added the cheesecake base and baked it at 400 for a while. I don't remember how long it was, 15-20 minutes probably, then I turned the heat down to 325 and baked it there for another 30-45 minutes.

The next day unsatisfied with the appearance I tried making a chocolate glaze. Taking the buttermilk and sour cream we had on hand and mixing in some 1% milk I warmed that and then poured over chocolate. The consistency was good and the flavor was actually really good. The only problem was that it never set up properly so there was chocolate oozing all over the place. 

Needless to say, this wasn't my best cheesecake, in fact I didn't particularly care for it. I did like the cheesecake but the chocolate was a bit disappointing. But that won't detour me from trying again!

Have you ever tried cheesecake? If so what do you think? If not, try it, it's simple and very diverse and you never know you may discover your own Great Cheesecake.
--Eric

*For the record, the cheese cake tasted delicious, the sauce was runny, and it was hard to cut. Who doesn't love chocolate oozing all over the place? But the cheesecake itself was pitch perfect. Thanks Eric for joining us for a weekly post!