I dressed mine up with tinted coconut grass and a fondant bunny looking for his carrots. It was one of the desserts for our family Easter dinner.
It was tasty, but not the best cheesecake I have ever had. It was very creamy and mild in flavor. I like my cheesecake to have bit more twang to it. My piece was also very soft from sitting out for for a few hours. I think it would have been better cold from the fridge.
Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake:
Crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs
1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. vanilla extract (or the innards of a vanilla bean)
1 tbsp liqueur, optional, but choose what will work well with your cheesecake
DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4 = 180C = Moderate heat). Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.
2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too - baker's choice. Set crust aside.
3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.
4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.
5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done - this can be hard to judge, but you're looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don't want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won't crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.
Pan note: The creator of this recipe used to use a spring form pan, but no matter how well she wrapped the thing in tin foil, water would always seep in and make the crust soggy. Now she uses one of those 1-use foil "casserole" shaped pans from the grocery store. They're 8 or 9 inches wide and really deep, and best of all, water-tight. When it comes time to serve, just cut the foil away.
Prep notes: While the actual making of this cheesecake is a minimal time commitment, it does need to bake for almost an hour, cool in the oven for an hour, and chill overnight before it is served. Please plan accordingly!
Some variations from the recipe creator:
** Lavender-scented cheesecake w/ blueberries - heat the cup of heavy cream in the microwave or a saucepan until hot but not boiling. Add 2 tbsp of lavender flowers and stir. Let lavender steep in the cream for about 10-15 minutes, then strain the flowers out. Add strained cream to cheesecake batter as normal. Top with fresh blueberries, or make a quick stove top blueberry sauce (splash of orange juice, blueberries, a little bit of sugar, and a dash of cinnamon - cook until berries burst, then cool)
** Cafe au lait cheesecake with caramel - take 1/4 cup of the heavy cream and heat it in the microwave for a short amount of time until very hot. Add 1-2 tbsp. instant espresso or instant coffee; stir to dissolve. Add this to the remainder of cream and use as normal. Top cheesecake with homemade caramel sauce (I usually find one on the food network website - just make sure it has heavy cream in it. You can use store-bought in a pinch, but the flavor is just not the same since its usually just sugar and corn syrup with no dairy).
** Tropical – add about a half cup of chopped macadamias to the crust, then top the cake with a mango-raspberry-mandarin orange puree.
** Mexican Turtle - add a bar of melted dark chocolate (between 3 and 5 oz., to taste) to the batter, along with a teaspoon of cinnamon and a dash of cayenne pepper (about 1/8 tsp.). Top it with pecan halves and a homemade caramel sauce.
** Honey-cinnamon with port-pomegranate poached pears – replace 1/2 cup of the sugar with 1/2 cup of honey, add about a teaspoon or more (to taste) of cinnamon. Take 2 pears (any variety you like or whatever is in season), peeled and cored, and poach them in a boiling poaching liquid of port wine, pomegranate juice/seeds, a couple of "coins" of fresh ginger, a cinnamon stick, and about a 1/4 cup of sugar. Poach them until tender, then let cool. Strain the poaching liquid and simmer until reduced to a syrupy-glaze consistency, then cool. Thinly slice the cooled pears and fan them out atop the cooled cheesecake. Pour the cooled poaching syrup over the pears, then sprinkle the top with chopped walnuts and fresh pomegranate seeds.
Some variations from Jenny (from JennyBakes):
**Key lime - add zest from one lime to sugar before mixing with cream cheese. Substitute lemon juice, alcohol, and vanilla with key lime juice.
**Cheesecakelets - put in muffin tins, ramekins, or custard cups. Try baking 20-35 minutes, or until still a little jiggly, and cool as before.
Overall it was a very good and easy recipe and I would like to try some of the other variations in the future. If you make it, let me know how you like it. And check out the Daring Bakers' blog roll to see what creations other members have come up with.
Happy baking!
Sharon
http://www.sugaredproductions.com/
I usually try and find the original dimensions of a vehicle first. Then scale it down to where it will fit on a piece of paper (8x14).Then from there, I use a ruler to see the size of the tire space, space from bumper to start of tire, distance between tires then the distance between the back tire and the back bumper. Now I am able to get my dimensions for my board with holes inset for the tires to go up in. (I always do a paper template also in case someone needs one again!!!!)
Then carve.
Here it is moved over to the cake board getting all the detail work done.
Bulges galore, more saggy fondant. A total nightmare.
And here is the Cherry Hog's birthday cake.
CH with her cake. She loved it.
Sharon and CH.
Sharon, CH and Janice.
Seafood boil of crabs , crawfish, potatoes, corn and more!
J-Man got to drive the boat!
Cherry Hog and her nephew D.
My BFF Heather gave me the great idea of using Styrofoam as the base of the cake. I used an 8 inch ball and cut it a little shorter than in half. I cut a flat bottom so it would stand up, and I used another piece of styro as "sand paper" to shape the bottom half of the cherry. (I learned that trick in a Collette Peter's demo.)
I then attached a circle of parchment paper to the top of the styro with buttercream to form a barrier with the cake.
First layer of cake in place.
I put a ball of modeling chocolate down in the hole to serve as the pit. Tee hee. Then I plugged the hole with the cake from the heating core.
Second layer of cake in place.
Carved to a cherry shape with a sharp knife. I intentionally went with a somewhat asymmetrical look, because real cherries are not perfectly round. Also makes the carving easier; I love that!
Then I applied a basecoat of thickened ganache over the whole thing. The ganache is 2 parts semi sweet chocolate to one part heavy cream. You let it cool to a thick paste consistency and then apply it just like a buttercream coat with a hot spatula. It firms up to make a nice chocolate shell; a wonderful surface on which to apply your fondant.
I smeared the whole cake with piping gel and then applied red fondant. I used a wad of fondant cupped in my hand in lieu of fondant smoothers. This works great on round and curved shapes.
After the everclear dried (took about 2 minutes) , I gave it several coats of red color. Let the coats dry in between or you will get pooling and dripping of color. Here it is still wet with color. (And I am still blowing red snot a week later.)
One more coat of color and dried.
I made the stem by wrapping several 18 gauge floral wires with brown floral tape and then airbrushed brown and green over that. I just stuck the stem down thru the center of the cake and down into the base of the styro. Note: This is not food safe, but it was for Cherry Hog so I did not care. The proper thing to do would have been to coat the part of the stem going down into the cake with chocolate and dried before inserting.
I made the beach chair with the cutter set here. I cut the pieces from white gumpaste. After fully dried I painted them with brown airbrush color mixed with everclear to make the wood look. The seat of the chair is white gumpaste. Ain't it cute?? I love this chair! The sand is Domino's brownulated sugar from the grocery store.
It was a lot of fun making this cake! This is when I love caking the most. A fun, challenging cake that has a special story to go with it.
Paint the accent areas inside the mold with colored chocolate and a paint brush. It's easier to do if the chocolate is cooled off a bit and a bit stiffer. Don't be too worried about staying exactly in the lines. If you paint out of the lines, just let it air dry, and then use a toothpick to scrape off the excess where you don't want it to be. Use a soft brush to brush out all the "crumbs". Why not pop it in the fridge instead of waiting for it to air dry? Because that will cause the chocolate to release from the mold, and when you try to clean it up with the tooth pick, the whole piece of colored chocolate will pop right out. And then you will cry, and have to start all over.
This is what the outside of the mold looks like after the inside has been painted.
Then fill both cavities with melted chocolate in the color of your choice. Make sure the chocolate is cool to the touch. If it is too warm, it will melt your colored accents and they will run and smear. And then you will cry, and have to start all over again.
I put it in my freezer for 12-14 minutes, and then the 2 pieces come right out of the mold with a gentle tap. Let them come to room temp in cool room before you touch them. If not, you will get finger marks on the condensation you will not be able to repair. Then you will cry, and have to start all over again.
All packaged up and ready to be delivered by the real Easter Bunny.
