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Culinary Milestone: Cheesecake


Super Decadent Cheesecake
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My relationship with cheesecake has been a tumultuous one. For the longest time I had an aversion to it because my first piece of cheesecake accompanied my first bout of food poisoning - not a good association. I was pulled out of my anti-cheesecake stance by a tall, dense New York style cheesecake with a juicy strawberry topping. Ever since then I've never shied away from a cheesecake.

Except if it was to make one. I've tried a few times to make a cheesecake to disastrous results. They just don't bake up right for me. Springform pans fail as soon as I look at them. Every trick, tip and technique that has been suggested has been tried to no avail. After a while I started to think I was born under a no cheesecake moon or something.

Recently, I have been feeling very confident in my culinary skills and I was enamored with a blog post of a super rich cheesecake that haunted my dreams. Even so, I didn't feel my cooking fu could handle this Big Momma Cheesecake so I took out a secondary form of insurance - cooking supervision by my formally trained, pastry chef extraordinaire friend.

So I trudged over on a Sunday morning with THREE pounds of cream cheese to put this bad boy together. We deviated  from the recipe by taking every precaution when baking this cake to offset my cheesecake making jinx.

Boy, was my jinx lifted! The cheesecake was dense and tangy and not one bit dry but with a wonderfully crumbly texture. It's everything I look for in a cheesecake.



At any rate the cake was awesome and worth every step. If I can make this cake anyone can and should. I warn you this is a super rich cake and a little goes a long way.

A word of caution though, the recipe calls for a 10.5 inch springform pan but apparently most pans are 9.5 inches so I had a lot of left over filling that my cheescake sensai made into a small cheesecake for her fiance.

On my next try I will use this recipe to make two cheesecakes that are a bit shorter as I would like a bit more crust to cake ratio. Also I want to make a strawberry-gelatin-set strawberry topping. I'll wait to post a recipe with calorie counts (gulp) when I get those details worked out. But I encourage everyone to head over to The Amateur Gourmet site and give his recipe for Double The Cream Cheese Cheescake a try!







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