Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Does cheesecake float?”…

Holy cow am I late on this one. This was actually supposed to be for the Daring Bakers challenge last month. Jenny Bakes supplied a simple enough cheesecake recipe to follow, but I just couldn’t do it. I can’t handle another cream cheese, brick-in-my-stomach-after-eating cheesecake experience. It’s good going down, but an unruly house guest to my stomach later.

So I hemmed and I hawed all month long….what the heck was I going to do? I want to participate in the challenge, but the thought of cream cheese brick syndrome left me nauseous. I know that some of the other DBers had similar issues with cheesecake and did some tweaks, so I began a search for a light alternative. Then I remembered Martha. That’s right, the woman who started it all for me and the very first baking book I bought offered salvation in a ricotta cheesecake *cue the angels singing with light shining down from the heavens*

(To appease the DB powers that be: The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.)  

Every day I look at cookbooks. I page through and wonder, “What do I want to make?” Not that my oven isn’t already full, but there’s always tomorrow. When contemplating this month’s DB adventure I vaguely remember coming across a drool-worth pic in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook for a ricotta cheesecake. The thought of ricotta didn’t necessarily jazz me, not that I have anything against ricotta but it never occurred to me to use it in a cheesecake. The key for me was the description of the cheesecake in the book, “Although rich, this cake is lighter than traditional cheesecakes because it calls for ricotta instead of cream cheese.” Sounds good to me. My stomach is appeased. Not only that, I didn’t have to worry about using some store-bought chemically laden cookies for a crust since the recipe didn’t call for one…a crust that is.

But hey, this is a Daring Bakers challenge right? This recipe is self-described as have a fifteen minute assembly time with no worry about crust preparation since there is none…where’s the daring in that? What could I add to a cheesecake to make it more daring? Some exotic fruit…big deal. Thanks to the interlibrary loan system, I was able to find inspiration in Bo Friberg’s Professional Pastry Chef. While perusing the pictures I came across a chèvre cheesecake topped with vanilla bean cream (pictured top right here). Great idea! My only issue was the cream was made with sour cream…another brick-in-the-stomach inducing substance for me. So what to do?

I’m not sure what made me think of panna cotta. It was probably a subconscious memory of yet another Martha concoction she highlighted last month on her show. I wish it was a conscious memory because then maybe I wouldn’t have run into any problems…more on those later. *ugh* Instead of using the vanilla bean cream on top, I thought it would be great to use vanilla bean panna cotta.

The last element I decided on was a fruit. Despite my desire to go for something unconventional like mango or apple, after going through all the fruits under the sun in my head, I gave in to the typical strawberry. It’s not that I’m not open to new flavors, but they were on sale. Cheap rules. I rounded the cheesecake agenda with a clear glaze, from the book Professional Baking, used to coat the strawberries. Thanks to a little ingenuity, what started out as a simple cheesecake turned into an elaborate production.

So I had everything planned out. But you know what they say about best laid plans…

I started with the cheesecake first, of course. This was probably the easiest part of my day. The only thing I think I would change is either making a smaller recipe or getting a larger cake keeper. I ended up having to use a 10 1/2 instead of a 9 inch pan because I was worried about fitting not only the cheesecake batter, but also the panna cotta in the pan. Once I finally had the cake finished I couldn’t cover it with anything because it was just way too big.

I got the pan prepared and decided to wrap it with aluminum foil even though the recipe didn’t call for a water bath. You’ll see later why this is a good idea. Then I mixed everything together but the egg whites, then beat those until they looked like the Himalayas. The next step was folding in those egg whites.

Pour everything into the pan and shove in the oven. An hour later I took a peak. I was looking at something that looked more like a soufflé than a cake. The cake had risen above the top of the pan. At this point I thought, there goes the panna cotta idea. Not only that, mine looked a heck of a lot darker and cracked than the one pictured in the book. My instincts were that the cake would sink when cooling and thankfully, this time, they were right. By the time I had taken the cake out of the oven and took this photo it had already sunk quite a bit and still had further to go.

Some of you may be saying that the idea of having a panna cotta topped cheesecake is something only to be found in some bizarro parallel universe, but I found out that I’m not the only one to think of this, which could have really come in handy during assembly if I was a smarter baker. After coming up with this idea on my little own-some, I discovered in the same Bo Friberg’s Professional Pastry Chef that gave me the idea to top it with something actually included a panna cotta topped cheesecake. In this case it was a recipe for a mascarpone cheesecake topped with cassis panna cotta. The cassis is credited to crème de cassis, a black currant liqueur. I was making a ricotta cheesecake with a vanilla bean panna cotta, but figured that the assembly instructions would essentially be the same.

The instructions in the book talked about using a strip of acetate to facilitate the panna cotta topping staying on top, but I didn’t have any acetate and frankly didn’t really know what he was getting at in how to use this implement at the time. I was rereading it just now, and I think I might have an idea on how to use it in the future. Here’s what it says, “Place a strip of acetate, 1 to 2 1/2 inches wide, around the inside perimeter of the cake, pressing it down 1/4 inch (6mm) between the baked cheesecake and the side of the pan.” I think I get it now, AND I think if I had used that I wouldn’t have ended up with a floating cheesecake, but more on that later.

So I whistled my way into the dark without the acetate and started the panna cotta recipe. Initially I was going to use the vanilla bean panna cotta recipe that was in Bo Friberg’s book. I’m not sure why, but when I saw that the recipe called for 7 cups of heavy cream I didn’t think twice. For some reason, I wasn’t born with any sense of measurement. My sense of direction isn’t too bad, but if you want me to tell you whether it’s one or fifty miles from my house to the local grocery store I really couldn’t tell ya. The same thing goes for cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, etc. It’s not as bad as my sense of distance, but it’s not far off. So 7 cups….it’s a lot, but it might as well have been 50. At least I thought better of it and decided to go with a half recipe. You really should be laughing by now because I am.

I measured out 3 1/2 cups of heavy cream and I started to get nervous. That’s a HUGE amount of heavy cream. And I’m supposed to add another cup of milk to that? No way! The milliliter conversion in the book (680 ml to 7 cups – ha!…you’ll see why in a moment) should have tipped me off that there was a big typo somewhere here, but I had no idea how many milliliters were in a cup (236 per cup by the way…ha! is right since the proper conversion should have been over 1652 ml). It took me maybe fifteen minutes of going back and forth between the kitchen, the book, and the computer to finally decide that this wasn’t going to work. A better baker would have realized the mistake and corrected the recipe herself, but I am not that baker. It was Professional Baking to the rescue. With measurements of quantities under 2 cups sounding more reasonable I was reassured.

As I had already wasted a bunch of time figuring out that I couldn’t work with the original recipe, I went with someone else’s. I don’t want to taint anyone’s opinion of this book, because it looks good otherwise and has great reviews to boot, but that was a bad mistake. Freaked me out. But you have to roll with the punches in the kitchen….if you can’t take the heat…as they say, and my cheesecake was getting cool.

According to Friberg’s book, I needed to let my “cake cool until it is just slightly warm; do not allow it to cool completely” before pouring the panna cotta on top. Time was a wastin’ and I needed to get this panna cotta show on the road. I found the use of gelatin to be another esoteric ingredient, which like yeast seems to possess magical properties. You’re in a situation where you know that you should end up with something resembling a solid once cool. The only thing required of you is trust that the element of gelatin will work its magic and turn the liquid you are stirring into a creamy solid. I was a bit lacking in the trust department, and kept waiting to see some mystical thickening process to take place. I waited so long that my cake was really quite cool by the time I put the concepts of cold and gelatin together and decided that I was going to have to dump the pot on the cake and just chill it already. So that’s what I did.

I’m not sure if it would have made a difference if the cake was on the warmer side in what happened. For the first 10 to 20 seconds everything appeared to be ok. It actually stayed on the top of the cheesecake and I breathed a sigh of relief as I got my camera and started taking pictures. Then it started to happen. The panna cotta mixture started to disappear.

Initially I thought that it was actually being absorbed by the cheesecake which was disconcerting. By this time I gave up on the idea of a success and just hoped that it tasted acceptable. Then the panna cotta was completely gone.

Or so I had thought. I took a bunch of pictures and decided to get this thing in the fridge so it could do whatever it was going to do. That was when I realize what happened to the panna cotta….it sunk to the bottom of the cheesecake. Yep, this is where that “floating cheesecake” comment comes into play. The cheesecake was floating on top of the panna cotta in the pan. I thought that it could work…hopefully. I wasn’t happy with the way the top looked, but if I could still get a layered look out of this cake I was happy. I couldn’t wait to see how it was going to turn out.

The next day I went to take the cheesecake out of the fridge to release it from the pan. This is about where I was really happy that I wrapped the pan in tin foil despite no water bath. I could feel it when I took the pan out of the fridge, the bottom was spongy. I knew that some of the panna cotta had seeped out of the pan. I pulled back the tin foil and found…

Not a good sign, but maybe it could still be salvaged. I pressed on and removed the sides of the pan to reveal…

Woo-hoo, it worked….sort of. It wasn’t exactly what I was going for, or what I expected but it still looked pretty cool. I wasn’t happy with the overall aesthetics, but ultimately the only thing that mattered was whether it tasted good. Still, I ended up throwing together some vanilla bean whipped cream to pipe all over the cake. The only thing I had left to do was a strawberry rehearsal and the glaze, before I could finish the assembly.

I finally got the thing put together in a visually pleasing assemblage. It was a ton of work, but I think the effect was worth it.

“How did it taste already?!” you ask. It was phenomenal! I never really liked cheesecake but this was fantastic. No brick in your stomach syndrome, just a light, almost custardy cloud in your mouth, and finally your stomach. And I loved the panna cotta and whipped cream with it. I’m glad that the panna cotta didn’t work out as planned because I might have not included the whipped cream and the three together were great. That said, if you don’t want to go to that much work, just make the cheesecake and you’ll still have a happy tummy.

So if you ever wondered if a cheesecake floats, I think this baking adventure answered that question. Here’s a slideshow with more pics of the process:

Ricotta Cheesecake with Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta, Whipped Cream, and Strawberries

Notes on assembly:
I’m going to repeat some of this later, but I thought I should give you a basic plan of attack from the beginning. Start with the cheesecake. Give the cheesecake a little time to cool down before you start the panna cotta because you don’t want it to be too hot when you pour it on. It’s up to you if you want the panna cotta on the top or bottom of the cheesecake.If you want it on the top you’ll have to use the acetate method, “Place a strip of acetate, 1 to 2 1/2 inches wide, around the inside perimeter of the cake, pressing it down 1/4 inch (6mm) between the baked cheesecake and the side of the pan.” I can’t vouch that it will work out as planned as I haven’t tried this myself. If you want your cheesecake to float and have the panna cotta on the bottom then I suggest letting the cheesecake cool completely before pouring the panna cotta on. I think that that probably contributed to the panna cotta going on the bottom.

Whatever you decide to do, once the panna cotta is on, chill the whole thing in the fridge for at least 4 hours or, preferably, overnight. The day you are going to serve this, I would slice up the strawberries next. I had two containers, but only used probably half of one. It’s a good idea to do a strawberry rehearsal of sorts. Basically on the bottom of a similarly sized pan, plan out the pattern of the slices. This way you know how it’s going to go when it’s time for placement on the cake, and you don’t have to worry if you have enough of the right size/shape of slices. Then put together the clear glaze for the strawberries. After that, it’s time to whip up the cream. You can just slather that on with a spatula, or fill up a piping bag with a star tip like I did and pipe your heart out. Once the cake is covered, dip your strawberry slices into the glaze, shake off the excess, and place in your rehearsed pattern on top of the cake. Congratulations! You’re done!

Ricotta Cheesecake

adapted from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook

3/4 cup sugar, plus more for pan
1 1/2 pounds fresh whole milk ricotta cheese, run through a blender or food processor until smooth
6 large eggs, separated
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Generously butter and sugar a 10 1/2-inch springform pan. Wrap the outside bottom and sides of the pan with a double layer of aluminum foil. In a large bowl, whisk together the ricotta, egg yolks, flour, half the sugar, and salt until combined; set aside.

In another bowl, mix the egg whites on low speed until foamy. With the mixer on high speed, gradually add the remaining sugar, beating until whites are stiff and glossy, 3 to 4 minutes.

Using a rubber spatula, fold a third of the egg-white mixture into the ricotta mixture until combined. Gently fold in the remaining egg-white mixture until just combined. Pour into the prepared pan, and bake until center is firm and the top is a deep golden brown, about 1 hour.

Notes on assembly: Let the cheesecake cool a bit before starting the panna cotta.

If you’re just going to make the cheesecake without any of the other elements I have here follow these instructions: Transfer to a white rack to cool 10 minutes. Place another wire rack on top of the pan, and invert the cake onto the rack to remove from pan. Reinvert cake and cool completely, top side up.

Vanilla Bean Panna cotta

adapted from Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen

1 1/4 cups milk
1 1/4 cups Heavy cream
1/2 cup  granulated sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons gelatin
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped

Heat the milk, cream, vanilla bean and sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a simmer. Remove from heat, and let stand for 10 minutes.

Soften the gelatin in cold water. Add the softened gelatin to the hot milk mixture and stir until dissolved. Strain the mixture and pour on top of the cheesecake. Allow to cool completely before chilling in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, preferably, overnight.

Notes on assembly: You could slice the strawberries up now, but I would wait to do it right before you whip the cream. They’ll look better if they’re sliced the same day they’re served. Again, I suggest doing a placement rehearsal on the back of a pan.

Vanilla Whipped Cream

2 cups (16 oz) heavy cream
1/3 cup confectioners sugar (or to taste)
1 vanilla bean (or 1/2 tsp vanilla extract)

If you’re not using a vanilla bean you can skip this first step. Place cream in a bowl. Cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape seeds into cream. Add bean to cream; whisk to combine. Cover mixture and refrigerate for 1 hour. Strain cream mixture into a chilled bowl.

Make sure the cream and all equipment and utensils are well chilled.

Beat the cream on medium until it forms soft peaks. Add the sugar (and vanilla extract if using). Continue to beat until the cream forms stiff peaks but is still smooth. Do not over-beat or the cream will become grainy and then separate to form particles of butter.

Notes on assembly: Once cheesecake has chilled, release sides of the pan from the cake. Cover the cake with the whipped cream using an offset spatula or a piping bag with your choice of tip, in my case it was the star tip.

Clear Glaze

adapted from Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen

1/4 cup water
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Mix the ingredients together and bring to a boil. Stir to ensure the sugar is completely dissolved. Apply while still warm but not hot.

Notes on assembly: By now you have your slices of strawberries all ready to go. Dip them in the glaze and place them in your chosen pattern on top of the cake. Enjoy!

Tagged as: Cheesecake, Daring Bakers, Oops!, Panna Cotta, Ricotta, Strawberry, Vanilla