Thanksgiving Cherry Chocolate Chip

The holidays are always an interesting time when it comes to cheesecake. There are so many traditional desserts, that there is often no reason to make a cheesecake. However, in our family there are a couple of people that approach me before the holiday and say "are you making a cheesecake for Thanksgiving?", "can you please make a cheesecake for Thanksgiving?", and this year was no different.

Once the decision is made, it is a matter of figuring out which flavor to make. There is always pumpkin pie, so it seems silly to double up and make a pumpkin cheesecake, though I really like my pumpkin cheesecake and don't particularly like pumpkin pie, but I don't typically make cheesecake for myself, so that isn't a big part of my decision. In my wife's family, there is always a chocolate creme pie and a banana creme pie as well, so chocolate is out. This year I decided that I would like to make a chocolate cherry chip cheesecake. There are many choices to be made; do I want a cherry flavored cheesecake? or cherries in the cheesecake? or cherries on top of the cheesecake? For the last two options, do I want fresh cherries? frozen cherries? dried cherries? do I want a glaze of some kind on top? Then it comes to the chocolate. Do I want to use chips or chunks? What brand do I want to use? and so on.

In the end I decided on a regular cheesecake on a graham cracker crust with chocolate chunks (Scharffen Berger that I happened to find on clearance at a Big Lots or something!) and bits of frozen cherries, with those same frozen cherries covered in glaze on top.

I chose frozen cherries because they are cheaper than fresh cherries, and since most of them were cooking into a glaze, the softness of them wouldn't matter, and the rest were being cut into chunks. Also, when frozen fruits thaw, they tend to produce a lot of juice, and I wanted that juice for my glaze. Finally, I just didn't want to have to pit a ton of fresh cherries!

First things first, I thawed out my frozen cherries. I set some aside in a strainer so their juices would drain away. These would be cut up and put into the cheesecake batter, and for anything that goes into the batter, you want it as dry as possible. Otherwise the juices thin out the batter or cause inconsistencies inside the batter which can lead to cracks in the final cheesecake. After draining I cut them up into quarters and wicked away as much of the remaining juice as I could get with a paper towel.

I was using my standard plain cheesecake recipe, and when the base was complete I added my chocolate chunks and my cherries. I then poured it into the crust, put it in the oven and the long wait began.

The next step was to make my glaze. I have found that fruit glazes are pretty darn easy to make. Take some fruit juice, some sugar, maybe a little arrowroot or corn starch, put it over a medium heat, cook and stir. Let it start to simmer, but never let it get to a full rolling boil. What you don't want is for the sugar to get hot enough to get into the candy stages. Rather you want the starch to do its job and thicken the syrup. In this case I ended up with a beautiful dark red syrup with large soft cherries in it that tasted amazing. I put it in a bowl and got it in the fridge to chill down and thicken up some more.

My cheesecake had baked, cooled, been put in the fridge, and chilled overnight, and it was time to put the whole thing together. I find that most recipes tell you to run a knife around the edge of your cheesecake pan to loosen it from the sides. I find that you often cut into the sides of the cake doing this and the presentation is just that much worse, so I came up with a different way. I take a large kitchen towel and soak it with boiling water, then I wrap the towel around the edge of the pan and let the heat do the work! In a couple of minutes I can usually remove the pan without fear of damaging the cheesecake!

I removed the cake from the pan and put it onto a cake plate, then poured the cherry glaze onto the top. Unfortunately I had a bit too much, and it was not quite thick enough, so it soon started pouring over the sides of the cheesecake and soaking into the crust. It was no big deal though, as it still looked great.

Cherry glaze perches precariously along the edge!

I did find when we cut into the cheesecake, that the center was a tad bit soft. I had under cooked it slightly. Additionally, all of the cherries and chocolate chunks in the batter ended up at the very bottom, sitting on the crust. I would prefer that my additions are suspended throughout the batter, as I feel that would produce a better cake both from a visual and a consistency/taste perspective. The problem is that my batter is too liquid when I put it in the crust, and when I slam it on the counter a few times to remove the bubbles, all of the additions sink right to the bottom. My typical recipe originally called for sugar, but lately the recipe I've been using replaces the sugar with sweetened, condensed milk. I think next time I make a cheesecake I am going to go back to the sugar method and see if I don't get a slightly denser cheesecake, and somewhat sweeter too, as I found the condensed milk doesn't add as much "sweet" to the mix as sugar does.

That's all for now. I'm pretty sure I'll be making another holiday cheesecake for Christmas, so hopefully I can get another post up soon! What do you think of Ginger with a lemon curd?

4th of July Strawberry Short-Cheesecake!

Now that I'm free of the tethers of The Haven and commercial baking, with the occasional exception like the wedding in the previous post, my posts will primarily focus on the individual cheesecakes that I make for family and friend events. I hope that this more personal level of post will be enjoyable. Personally I like it better because I get to focus on developing flavors rather than the rigors of commercial baking in quantity.

Our friends Emily and Adam throw a 4th of July party every year, and as is typical with me, I wanted to take a cheesecake. I was trying to decide on which flavor of cheesecake I would like to take. When it isn't a requested flavor I prefer to try things that I haven't tried before... to experiment. In the past I had taken a "banana split" cheesecake to this party (banana cheesecake with I think an Oreo crust, and topped with strawberry, hot fudge, whipped cream, and nuts) and I wanted a fun, summer-y flavor for this time as well.

I decided to do a cheesecake interpretation of Strawberry Shortcake. I consulted my favorite source for recipes, the cookbook from Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen and found a good recipe for shortcake. I made the shortcake pressed into a 9" springform and baked it. It pulled away from the sides and had a domed top, but I cut the top off and it made a pretty good crust. I then made a crust-less vanilla-bean  cheesecake (this is my favorite and "signature" flavor) using my standard recipe. I sliced up a bunch of strawberries and sweetened them with raw sugar. Personally for berries I like the more caramel flavor of sugar in the raw to table sugar. I put a layer of sliced strawberries down on the shortcake crust, put the cheesecake on top of that, covered the top of the cheesecake with berries and the juice and finished it off by using the top of the shortbread that we had cut off as a topper!

Strawberry Short-Cheesecake

I think it turned out looking great and even better, everyone loved it! The slices we cut were a little much, but I think that by spooning more berries on top and adding some whipped cream (sorry, I cheated and used a can!) it balanced everything out. Once again, most of the plates were left nice and clean !

I'll try to keep up the cheesecake tips as much as I can. In this case I have a tip that pertains to this story. When the shortbread came out of the oven I noted that it had pulled away from the sides of the pan, making it slightly smaller than the cheesecake round that would go on top of it. Some may have wanted to re-bake it or something, but when making a cheesecake in pieces, things like this are going to happen, and in the end as you can see, it looks just fine. Actually, the slight differences in the sizes made it look a bit more rustic and home-made which I think is perfect for the 4th of July!

Tonight I'm baking up my cheesecake for Thanksgiving so stay tuned for the next post!

And I'm back!

So, it's been a while since I posted here. This is primarily because I am no longer part-owner of The Haven as I once was. The Haven failed and we had to close it down. I miss the chance to constantly experiment with cheesecake flavors and come up with new and exciting things, but I don't miss the long hours, lost weekends, and the crazy people we were partners with.

Just to catch up, I make far fewer cheesecakes now than then obviously. I pretty much just make them for friends, family, and special events. In fact, I was supposed to make one for a Halloween party, but we ended up taking other things instead.

I did have one story to tell that kind of bridges the gap between business and family. I made cheesecakes for my cousin's wedding. I had to serve 200-300 people. It was a lot of work.

Becky came to me when she first got engaged and said that instead of a regular wedding cake, she wanted cheesecakes. She asked if I would be ok with making them for her. I of course said yes. Then she told me that there would be 200-300 people at this wedding! Eventually we got around to discussing flavors, and display. I offered to do cheesecakes but then cover them in fondant and make it look like a regular wedding cake, but she said that she was ok with individual cakes, so that's what I did. We decided on two flavors, chocolate chip and white chocolate raspberry, and I was making a total of thirty-one, as I also did a groom's cake in a different flavor (caramel).

The logistics were rough. I had to get ingredients, I had to have the time, and I had to have the storage space. Luckily for the ingredients I still have the Restaurant Depot membership card that we had with The Haven, so I was able to get all of the ingredients for a pretty reasonable price, and all in one trip! As for the time, with the wedding on a Saturday I took off the two days prior to the wedding. Storage space was a little harder to come by, but my in-laws had an extra fridge in their garage, so we emptied it out completely and were able to stack right around twenty to twenty-four cheesecakes in there. If we had proper boxes that weren't two times taller than necessary, then I would have been able to fit them all... but proper boxes were WAY too expensive.

Another piece of logistics was the timing involved in actually baking these things. When the Haven folded we took the counter-top convection oven that I had used there, and combined with my oven at home I could bake upwards of eight to ten at a time. However, as I found at the Haven, the most I could comfortably mix at the time was three. So I did them in batches of three in each oven. Mix three, put them in the oven, mix another three, put them in the other oven. Clean up and wait, then repeat. In this manner I was able to get eighteen made the first day, and had plenty of time for the remaining twelve plus the groom's cake... and honestly, I messed up the groom's cake on the first run so I had to make a second one. They were all made in time, and they were all in cold storage until the big day.

Delivery and transport weren't too tough, except that we had to do it between the wedding (which we were attending) and the reception (which we were also attending) and it made us stress out a bit. We have an SUV, so we drove from the wedding to our house, picked some up, then to the in-law's house and picked up the rest. Luckily the wedding, reception, our house, and the in-law's house were all within ten minutes of each other! We got to the reception and started carrying in box after box containing cheesecake and in the end it wasn't too bad. We were done with the three best looking ones set up on the cake table and the rest in the kitchen with a lot of time to spare before the wedding party even showed up.

The end of this story is kind of sad and kind of happy at the same time. First, the groom barely got to taste his cheesecake as he wasn't feeling very good. The bride did have a bite or two, but all of that is understandable. They had a lot going on after all! After all the guests were served I asked one of the servers how much was left and she said "lots." I decided to check it out and in the end they had served roughly ten to twelve of the cheesecakes which means they had eighteen left over. I made sure that the bride's mother took one home for the bride and groom, and one for herself. We took two of them home, and the in-laws got one or two. After that we let the other guests take one if they wanted and the staff as well got to dig in. (We also took one of the bottles of champagne that they had opened but didn't need!) So, sad because we made WAY too much cheesecake, and happy because a lot of people were able to take the extras home!

In the end it was a fun experience. If I ever have to make cheesecake for a large group like that again, I would definitely do it in smaller quantities. I was just happy that we had the means and ability to pull it off, and since we were just family making food for family (and not selling it at all) we didn't have to worry about the laws regarding commercial kitchens or anything. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and had a great time.