TWD (on Thursday): Tall & Creamy Cheesecake

Happy New Year! This is my first post of 2009 and, may I say, what a great way to start off a new year of blogging! When I saw that the recipe that Anne Strawberry chose for December 30th was a cheesecake, I knew that I wanted to serve it on New Year's Eve. It's just such a great dessert and I think that nearly everyone likes cheesecake. Everyone, that is, except for me! Yeah, I don't really like cheesecake. I love cream cheese plain but sweetened just doesn't do it for me. I did like this cheesecake though, it's not too sweet and very creamy. I served it with strawberry sauce, French chocolate sauce, and caramel sauce and I think that it went over very well.

I did go through a "cheesecake phase" a few years ago. It was sort of like Picasso's Blue Phase, only not nearly as illustrious. I set out to make "the perfect cheesecake" and I spent a couple of months experimenting with various and sundry methods of preparation. My final version was a take on a New York style cheesecake and the feedback was excellent. The feedback on this cheesecake was a little lukewarm but I think that if I liked it, it had to be pretty darn good.

Dorie offers a lot of ideas for playing around and I pondered making it fancier but I also knew that I was going to serve this to an assorted group of friends on New Year's Eve and I thought that perhaps the best route would be to keep it simple and offer some sauces to accompany the cheesecake. I followed the recipe exactly, crust and all. I used 1/3 c heavy cream and 1 c sour cream. I always make sure that all of my ingredients are at room temperature when I make a cheesecake. I had the water in the kettle for the bain marie and I had triple wrapped the springform pan with heavy duty aluminum foil because mine is a little leaky sometimes anyway and I read Nancy's post about the water getting through her foil and I didn't want to take any chances. Well, I didn't figure out until then that my mom doesn't have a roasting pan big enough for the springform pan to sit in (neither do I for that matter) and I had to improvise. So, I put a pan of the boiling water on the rack directly underneath the cheesecake and crossed my fingers. But all of that stress about triple wrapping the pan was for nothing. The oven was very humid but I'm blaming my lack of a bain marie on the cracks in my cheesecake as well as the dark top. I will say, the cracks faded to almost nothing as the cheesecake cooled. So, I think I'm going to scour the after Christmas sales for a roasting pan. I've wanted one forever but I have no idea where I'm going to keep it in my little Washington kitchen (which isn't actually that little but it's little for all of the kitchen gear I like to accumulate). I am completely taken with the idea of a smooth, pale, non-cracked cheesecake like Dorie shows in her picture. If I hadn't seen proof of other TWD-ers who achieved this I'd think it was photo editing. But, it's possible and I want to try. So, when I find a good deal on a great roasting pan -- it's on!

Thanks to Anne Strawberry for picking such a festive dessert to finish off a wonderful year of TWD blogging.