Dessert Recipes

Abdrew Krause asked:


The baked New York style cheesecake recipe, on its surface, looks like one of the more simple dessert recipes. It’s a fairly simple set of ingredients, and the mixing and baking is fairly straightforward.

So why does it so often go wrong? Well, part of the problem is in the name: cheesecake. Right there, you expect it to act like a cake in the baking process. The problem is, it’s not really a cake at all. If you were to take a hundred cooking school graduates who had never heard of cheesecake and present each of them with a slice of baked New York style cheesecake, all of them would most likely identify it as a pie… or at best a custard.

Let’s start with the crust. Cakes don’t normally have a crust other than what bakes up when they cook, right? Well, your cheesecake needs a crust or you’re going to have containment issues. This is not usually a traditional piecrust, but rather a blind baked mashed-together construction made of graham crackers, cookies or other baked goods.

Then there’s the composition of the cheesecake itself. The baked New York style cheesecake begins life as a very thick batter that bears a vague resemblance to traditional cake batter, except for the fact that it contains little or no flour depending on your recipe.

The baking is different, also. One of the secrets to New York style cheesecake success is a fairly moist baking environment, which means using a water bath. Have you ever seen a cake recipe that called for the pan to be placed in a larger pan with water in it?

So, for cheesecake success, you might want to stop thinking about it as a cake. Think of it as a pie-cake hybrid, or better yet as custard that needs some extra care in the preparation, but will yield sweet rewards when it’s done. The baked New York style cheesecake recipe is simple, but can be unforgiving if you don’t treat it right.



Sanchez

Abdrew Krause asked:


There are few desserts in the world of sweets more alluring that cheesecake. A good baked cheesecake recipe can provide a dessert that will make a bad meal into a good memory, and make a good meal into an event that will be talked about for years. A slice of baked cheesecake, especially New York style, is perfection itself. The creamy texture, the subtle flavors and the richness combine on the palate to make dessert truly the great finish to the meal.

You might be tempted at some point, however, to explore a simpler way to make your cheesecake. The baked cheesecake recipe, while simple, can be unforgiving at times, and it only takes a couple of failures to send even the most intrepid of home cooks looking for alternatives. What they soon find, however, is that there really is no adequate substitute for the creamy richness of the baked version.

There are no-bake cheesecake recipes in great supply on the Internet, and you are more than welcome to be adventurous and try one. Before you serve one to your dinner guests, however, you would be well advised to make one just for in-home consumption. Why?

The answer is quite simple: There is not a single no-bake cheesecake recipe in existence that will give you anything approaching what you get when you go through the effort of producing a baked cheesecake. Most of the no-bake recipes rely on some sort of gelatin to thicken the mix, or they mix in whipped cream to try to mimic the texture of the baked product. While both options produce a generally edible end product, in the immortal words of Snoopy there are like “giving a starving dog a rubber bone.”

If you are going to cook a great meal, and put a lot of effort into it, why go cheap on your dessert? Putting forth the effort to follow a baked cheesecake recipe is worth it every time.



Gibson