The original recipe is here - NY cheesecake (gosh I love Debs recipes, and she's writing a cookbook, and if someone wanted a cake for his birthday, you know, something like a peanut butter chocolate cake, her cookbook might be a really good way to start the bribery and corruption. Just sayin').
It's fairly expensive to make, so I've put some notes in about how I've saved a few dollars here & there.
Ingredients:
Base:
225g of biscuits, crushed. I use McVitties Digestive biscuits, but you could also use Granitas (yum!) or anything that takes your fancy, really.
115g unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup of white sugar
1/4 t salt
Filling:
1k cream cheese (I buy neufchatel from the market. It's cheaper that way. If you don't have time but have money, you can get a kilo of philly cheese from the supermarket, but that's about $17, and a kilo of neufchatel is $10)
250g marscapone cheese (or just add another 250g of cream cheese in. I don't notice much difference in texture)
1 3/4 C white sugar
2T flour
1 Orange zested (yes, zest an entire orange).
1 Lemon zested (see above)
5 large eggs (also got from markets - that way you can get free range eggs cheaper than normal eggs in the supermarket)
2 egg yolks
1/2 t vanilla
Topping:
425g of blueberries (I use frozen ones)
3T lemon juice
1/3 C sugar
1T + 1t corn flour (so, 25ml)
3/4 C water
Preheat oven to 180C (160 if fan forced).
Line 2x12 muffin trays with large patty pans.
Make base:
Put biscuits in blender until they resemble breadcrumbs. Add melted butter, salt and sugar, combine.
Put approx 1T (loose) of base mixture in each patty pan. Press down with the back of a soup spoon, it should be about the right size.
Put in fridge until ready for filling. (Or, you know, don't. I didn't have room in my fridge once, didn't seem to make much difference).
Filling:
In a BIG mixer, put in the cream cheese, marscapone, flour, sugar, and zest. Mix slowly until combined. A few hints:
1) don't use the whisk attachment. I've got a Kenwood chef, it's got a K beater (which I only just realised probably is K for Kenwood. As a child, I was sure it was K for Kate, and I thought that was really cool. Anyway...) You don't want to introduce too much air to the mixture, so a paddle type beater is going to be much better.
2) mix it SLOWLY, unless you want to clean cream cheese off your ceiling.
2a) don't put the cream cheese in one big lump in to the mixer. See note about ceiling.
3) if you check Deb's recipe and do the calculations, you'll see that I have more cream cheese than her. Nobody has ever complained that there's "just a hint" too much cheese (and if anyone does now, they'll be banned from my cooking for eternity *laughs*) and if you get a kilo of neufchatel from the market, it's almost impossible to get all the cheese out of the wrapper. So it all works out in the end. Especially when you have a dog that loves stealing the wrapper eating all the bits of cheese left. Not that it's ever happened to me or anything.
Add the egg yolks, one at a time. Scrape down the bowl in between. You add the yolks first, just in case you break a yolk when cracking it, it's a bugger when that happens on your last egg and it was supposed to be just a yolk. Of course, if you're not as unco as me, add them in whichever order you like.
Add the eggs, one at a time, still scraping down sides in between eggs.
Add the vanilla.
Put filling in cases - each case will get about 1/2 a cup of filling, and will be extremely full.
Bake for 30 mins. It may puff and crack, but don't panic. The puff will go down as they cool off, and the cracking will be hidden.
Cool out of reach of dogs and children. Erm, if you don't have a dog, cool them anywhere you like.
Make topping (see, this is why it doesn't matter if the tops of it crack...)
Combine all ingredients in saucepan, bring to boil. Boil for 2 minutes, remove from heat, allow to cool completely to get it to set.
Spread topping on top of cheesecakes.
Done!
Now I'm wondering what your ceiling actually looks like ;)
ReplyDeleteHeh, it's not that bad. I have overhead cupboards, so I just clean it off bottom of them (c;
ReplyDeleteAlthough there was this one time... I had to beat something while it was heating.
And I have TWO power points in my kitchen, and neither of them are near the oven...
That went up the sides of the oven, the walls, the chimney... (My oven is in the old fireplace.)