Rough Week

Last week was not the best one on the books. The cheesecakes didn't sell very well for the first half of the week, or over the previous weekend, but I knew that I needed to stock up for the weekend since it was Stagecoach Days in the wonderful city of Banning, CA. Saturday morning was the city parade, it started right outside our door, and it was two hours long! Our new menus just got printed, and it was a great opportunity to market ourselves to people that may or may not have known we even existed. But let's get back to the cheesecake.

By Wednesday night I had most of a peanut butter, about three quarters of a chocolate, and maybe half of a vanilla bean cheesecake in the case. I think we have determined that the Chocolate Truffle is a best seller, so I am going to try and have that, along with my signature Vanilla Bean all the time. Then I can rotate in a new flavor as needed, about every week or so. This will help in many respects, as we can stock up on supplies for the constant flavors, and just pick up the few items needed for the one new flavor each week.

Thursday was my baking night this week, and for another Haven Cafe related issue, I took off from my regular job at noon and headed for home. We had our meeting (which turned out to be a pretty big waste of time) and it all went downhill from there. When we got back I hit the grocery stores, as I was going to bake Pumpkin Cheesecake! The goal is to let people know that we have it, and that we are taking orders for "your holiday cheesecake" so that maybe we get some additional business that way. I went to 4 stores, and at one of them I find this on the shelf:

That's right. No pumpkin. Anywhere. Now what? It turns out that an overly rainy season, coupled with a late harvest has left the pumpkin grower with a massive shortage. Nobody in the country has canned pumpkin! Between shopping and getting back to the Haven, I have decided to make a batch of vanilla bean, and we can keep the peanut butter in the case another day. I would go back on Friday night and make... well, whatever flavor I could figure out. I get moving on the Vanilla Bean cheesecakes, and for some reason I was just off my game. At around 8 I had just pulled the crusts out of the oven and was getting started on the batter... and around 8:30 I go to pour my first two into the crust, and I could see big chunks of unmixed cream cheese pouring into the bowls! I was wrecked. I couldn't use them. I had to dump two whole cheesecakes worth of batter and crust... and it was nearly 9 at that point. If I were to get the other 2 into the oven by 9:30, they take about 50 minutes to bake, and another 3-4 hours to cool before being able to stick them in the fridge... well, I wouldn't have gotten home until 1:30 or 2! I decided to call it a night. I wrapped the 2 unused crusts, cleaned up and headed home. It was not a good day.

Friday however, was better. I had decided to do mint-chip cheesecake, so I made sure I had what I needed in the morning before work, and I was going to head straight to the Haven to get going on them. However, around 4:30 I get a photo in my text from my wonderful wife Jan. It's a can of Pumpkin! Farmer's Market Organic Pumpkin to be exact. She bought the store out which sounds worse than it is, as they only had 6 cans. But at least we know it's out there!

Despite a couple of things that set me back an hour or so, I finally got the pumpkin cheesecakes in the oven. Much to my chagrin, I found out that I really need to be more in tune with my oven. The batter for the pumpkin cheesecake is thinner than that of any of my other flavors, and there's more of it. As a result I needed to cook them at a lower temperature, for a longer period of time. I could tell this was the problem because at one point they started to rise. Cheesecake when cooked properly doesn't rise. In fact the top should be perfectly flat. They rise when the temperature is too hot, causing the liquid in them to turn to steam, thus the cheesecake inflates as this steam attempts escape. This essentially means that the cheesecake is full of hot air, and as such, when the oven gets turned off, they cool off, and the tops sink right back down, lower than they were when they started. It also causes things like cracks to appear in the top. Fortunately the taste and texture were still good, so we could actually serve them.

I went back Saturday morning and busted out two vanilla bean cheesecakes. By noon those would be in the case as well, and we would be fully stocked on cheesecake... but I had about four slices of peanut butter cheesecake that was taking up my room... what to do? I didn't want to waste it, so instead I cut the edges and crust off of it, balled it up and dipped it in chocolate! Oh, and I put them on a stick! Peanut Butter Cheesecake Truffles! I made twelve truffles out of those four slices, and by the end of the night I was down to only three! So a cheesecake that sold maybe two slices in three days is suddenly gone! That's my kind of business!

The week wasn't that great, but it ended on a high note, and now I know exactly what to do with a cheesecake that won't sell. So let me leave you with a tip for this week.

I mentioned last time that I had two "not my cheesecake" tips, and here's the second one. If you aren't going to take the time and effort to do it right, then it would be better not to do it at all. I heeded this advice on Thursday, and when my batter came out lumpy, I dumped it and moved on rather than attempting to save a buck and serve an inferior product. Here is how this is a "not my cheesecake" story. Not too long ago, my wife and I went out to a fancy restaurant. We had the Chef's tasting menu. Despite a rocky start that lead to some free wine, the meal itself was pretty good. Then came the dessert. It was a trio of various desserts, including a cheesecake. I cannot remember what flavor it was, but it had an interesting kumquat sauce on it that was pretty good. The cheesecake however was not very good at all. It was a non-white batter which turned out to be a bad thing, because as we cut into it, we could see many chunks of white! These were bits of cream cheese that didn't get mixed properly into the rest of the batter! I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable to a cheesecake guy like myself. I don't know if the chef knows how to make cheesecake or not. Anyone can follow any recipe that they want, but unless you know certain techniques, then things will go wrong, and unfortunately for that chef, solid bits of cream cheese were left suspended in his batter. All it takes is doing things in the proper order, and for the proper amount of time, but since this chef (or maybe his souse chef) didn't take that time or effort, and as a result what he served was inedible.