Sometimes I get the impression that I’m probably one of those insane picky eaters, I guess I am..because….I don’t care for cheesecake. You can pelt me with boxes of Philly if you’d like, but that won’t do a bit of good. I never liked cheesecake. Let me clarify this statement a bit. If someone plops a slice of cheesecake in front of me chances are I’ll eat it, enjoy quite a few bites of it if not all of it, and then five to ten minutes after eating it I’ll start hating myself for the rock of cream cheese that is now simmering in the bottom of my stomach. This is what happens to me when I eat anything that has THAT much fat in it. Burping, yeah, I start burping too. Don’t ask me why, I’m a baker not a doctor! (Don’t I have that mixed up somehow? I suppose if I was a doctor and named McCoy it’d be the other way around. I don’t dress up as a Klingon or anything, but I do love Star Trek 
)
So, after that preamble, I did really like this cheesecake….some of the time. The Tall and Creamy Cheesecake for this week’s challenge was selected by Anne of AnneStrawberry. I purposely had to go out and buy a springform pan. Thankfully this is one of those hovering around ten buck purchases that I can manage once in awhile and Santa didn’t treat me too badly. Too bad the pan I selected turned out to rust around the latch after washing so this is going back to my favorite store, HomeGoods.
Anyways, one of the other things that don’t get me raving about cheesecake is the crust – graham crackers? Ehh. Now that’s a “ehh” not a “blech” or a “gah!” – “ehh” is take it or leave it, the rest are “get this out of my mouth now!” Because of the “ehh” designation I decided to throw caution to the wind and try something else, a Nilla Wafer crust.
This too turned out to be “ehh” and actually a bit too salty for my tastes, at least I think it was salty, something was maybe not rotten, but certainly off in the state of Denmark. I think to get the gilded crust that is tasted in my mind’s eye I’ll probably have to bake my own cookies. I’ll have to try that whenever I make another cheesecake..yeah…sure…whenever that happens.
I did encounter one other problem which has nothing to do with anyone or anything except little ‘ol me. Sometimes (sometimes? maybe a bit more than sometimes) I get these mentally challenged spells and I can’t seem to manage tasks that should be simple. For instance, in one of my first semester finals in college we had to write an essay there in class, not one of those take home deals, right there with the teacher boring his gaze through your forehead. God knows what the essay was on, I don’t even remember what class. Maybe it was the affects globalization on developing economies, who knows. All I know is I got to a point in writing the essay where I could not, for the life of me, remember how to spell the word “of”, that’s right o-f. I kept thinking, “o-v, o-v…that can’t be right!” Eventually I got it. I think that was the same test where I forgot to spell “the” – at least that’s three letters and not two. Well, that long drawn out story was trying to illustrate that there are times where my brain doesn’t seem to…well, work. When it came time to remove the sides of the pan, I had one of these broken-down-brain moments. I couldn’t figure it out. Doh! is right. We still managed to eat the cake, but it didn’t come out in pristine, perfectly formed slices. I ended up with more of a cheesecake mash, as you can see below.
Aside from the “ehh” crust-factor and my ineptitude with springform pans, the cakey part of the cheesecake was de-lish, at least when it was in my mouth being tasted. Light, fluffy, like a cloud that naked cherubs like to frolic in…that light and fluffy. The batter was really easy enough to make. I did start to fear that my bowl wasn’t big enough adding the last bit of the cream, but it made it.
All in all, a great recipe…for a cheesecake. If you don’t mind having your cholesterol jump 50 points by eating a slice, knock yourself out.
Last edited on January 25, 2009
