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Sunday, October 11, 2009

A New Yorker in New Zealand

I'm not a big desserts sort of a guy. You may have picked up on that from the scarcity of desserts gracing these pages. That and the fact that I refer to my lovely wife as Dessert Chef.

It is Dessert Chef that does the desserts. That is just how it is.

Until Dessert Chef got a book for her birthday.
If there is a dessert that can get my mouth watering at the very thought, it is real cheesecake.

For real cheesecake, I will enter the kitchen, roll up my sleeves and make dessert.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to make cheesecake was the best excuse I had ever had to buy a blender.

Yes, I can hear you. You're saying: "what, you don't already have a blender?" Well now I do.

There was no point wasting any more time. It's many years now since we were in New York, but my first stop on the Cheesecake Highway was at the corner of Fifth and Broadway.

I will say this: living out this particular dream was not a cheap one. You could have bought three of those cheap, sugary things that call themselves cheesecakes in supermarket fridges by the time you'd made this cheesecake. But the taste, without a doubt, simply does not compare.

And in reality I could have halved this recipe and made one smaller cheesecake which would have served us perfectly well, too. As it was we were eating cheesecake every night for half the week.

I am not complaining. Not one crumb.

New York Style Cheesecake

(Serves just the two of you, if you hide it from your guests)
Ingredients

Base
120g Wine Biscuits
3/4 C Sugar
50g melted Butter

Filling
1 1/2 C Sour Cream
1 C Sugar
2 Eggs
1 t Vanilla Essence
500g Cream Cheese
40g melted Butter
For the base, blend the biscuits, sugar and melted butter. (Look at the blender go. Isn't it sweet?)
Grease a 23cm springform pan and line the bottom with the base mixture, pressing down firmly and as evenly as possible.
Blend the sour cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla until smooth. (There it goes; that's one sweet blender.)
Chop up your cream cheese into small blocks. (I just wanted an excuse to put in a photo of the cream cheese. Nomnomnomnom.)
Add the cream cheese to the sour cream mixture and blend. Pour in the melted butter as you blend the mixture down to a smooth consistency. (You couldn't do that without a sweet, sweet blender.)
Pour the mixture over the base and spread out in an even layer.

Put the oven rack one third of the way up, and Fan Bake at 170C for 45mins. Check the interior of the cheesecake is cooked by sticking a knife in it - if it comes out mostly clean, it's done. (Ours took almost an hour.)

Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, overnight if you can.
Dust with icing sugar and serve with freshly whipped cream.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

We just ate at the famous Cheesecake Factory restaurant yesterday while shopping in the states. Of course we all wanted cheesecake for dessert. It was too sweet, didn't have that tang it's supposed to. Yours looks much better! I'll have to try yours now, just to fix the real taste in my mind. :^)
Laura/ Greenglam on Twitter

Laura Eno said...

I made several cheesecakes last Christmas and they were wonderful! What are wine biscuits?

Dan said...

Greenglam: I think we decided this might have been a tiny bit too sweet, so it might be worth cutting down on the sugar a bit if you really like the tang.

Laura: Wine biscuits are basically a plain, sweet, crispy cookie. They're good with butter and a cup of tea. In the top picture on this post, you can see them on the left. I'm not sure what the equivalent in the States would be. Any ex-pats out there able to help?

Laura Eno said...

Sweet, crispy cookie is a good enough definition, thanks! I was puzzled with biscuit - thought of doughy dinner biscuit. :)

Unknown said...

I love baked cheesecake. I also don't have a blender. Still deciding if I actually *need* one though. I think I should get a spring form cake tin for cheesecake before I really consider needing a blender ;)

Leah said...

Dan, the cheesecake I used to make had the juice of a lemon in it. That might take some of the sweetness off, perhaps.

lbs said...

You can use graham cracker crumbs for the base. They work just as well as wine biscuits.

lbs said...

I just made this cheesecake last weekend. It's really good, and so easy in the blender. Unfortunately, I had to share it with my husband, but what can you do???