Daring Bakers, April: Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake

The plot: A top-secret recipe is given out to a group of daring bakers at the beginning of every month. Sometime during that month, the follow the recipe, down to the ounce! At the end of the month, they share their results with the blogging world!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

Jenny posted the recipe in her blog, here.

We were tasked with the mission of flavoring the cheesecake however we liked. We were told to dress it up and show it off. At that . . . I failed. Because I was so busy with getting it done and served to my dinner party guests, that I simply dolloped it with mango whipped cream and sprinkled it with chopped macadamia nuts.


This was delicious. The cake felt heavy, but it tasted light, and it was as creamy as the cream and cream cheese from whence it came. It was an easy recipe to play with, especially with as few ingredients as it used. I'll definitely file this as my go-to cheesecake recipe.



The biggest challenge came when I insisted on using my springform pan even though I knew I'd be baking the cheesecake in a water bath and that my pan wasn't totally waterproof.


Luckily, my Hun helped me waterproof it a bit by wrapping the edges of the pan's bottom with foil. The recipe recommended using one of those disposable foil pans and just cutting the foil away. That's not eco-friendly! And I was too cheap and stubborn. So there.


I waterproofed a little further by lining the inside of the pan before pressing my crust in. I wanted a free-form crust and thought the cheesecake batter would sort meld with the crust, so the two would marble together like some beautiful cheesecake ballet. Instead, I had crust stalagmites.


The cheesecake seemed to come up relatively dry (meaning the crust wasn't soaked down by water that leaked in from the water bath--hooray!). I thought I might "hide" my crust stalagmites with a layer of mango gelatin, but then I saw that it would pour over the edge and down sides of the cheesecake. And I also thought that, just because it looks good, doesn't mean it would taste better. I'd already poured a bunch of mango nectar into the batter. I baked my cheesecake for 45 minutes before turning the oven off, and I'm sure that's why it was so nice and creamy.


We were thankfully allowed to play with the crust. I've never had a graham cracker crust that I've really liked. I've always sort of associated it with sucking up an entire sandy dessert, only sweeter, and kinda buttery. I used a short crust instead. In other words--I wrapped my cheesecake's innards with a lovely coat of sugar cookie. I mixed in a bunch of chopped macadamia nuts, too. I thought about adding some white chocolate, but that would've been a whole other cookie.


Most shameful of all, when I served this to my guests, I forgot all about the extra macadamia nuts until I was cleaning my kitchen counter off, long after my friends had gone home. Today's theme, then, was country rustic dressed in simple elegance.


Bejeweled!

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