No one in my family has ever made cheesecake. My Mom has always made this super quick recipe that doesn't require baking the cheesecake and if we want the real stuff we just head over to Giant Eagle and pick one up (shameless plug. Their cheesecake is the bomb.com). I decided, though, that I wanted to break the streak. I wanted to bake a cheesecake.
Unfortunately, I got so caught up in trying to get the stuff in the oven that I completely forgot to take pictures. So your just going to have to take my word for it that it did in fact happen. Anyways, here is the story of my adventurous and slightly humorous experience of baking cheesecake.
The other day I mentioned to my Mom that I wanted to try one of my Pinterest recipes and make a dessert. I got lazy, though, and decided that a Gossip Girl marathon sounded like more fun than baking. So my Pinterest food adventure didn't happen. Today, however, my Mom told me she wanted me to make something for dessert. So I hopped on Pinterest, searched "Cheesecake," found the prettiest picture of cheesecake, and opened the recipe.
I'm not sure if I mentioned this or not but we're kind of "shut-in" right now. In other words, the 10 degree temperatures, predicted 20 inches of snow, and sheets of ice on the roads have us staying indoors. Suffice to say, not much grocery shopping has been done as of late. So it took me a while to find recipe that we even had the ingredients for and when I finally found a recipe that I thought would work, we had to cut it in half (because seriously, who has 4 packages of cream cheese laying around?)
As I mentioned before, no in my family has ever made cheesecake. When I asked my Mom to dig up her old springform pan (the one she got as a wedding gift and has never used... Sorry Great Aunt Patricia if you're reading this) she looked at me funny. With this lack of experience comes a lack of understanding as to how one goes about making cheesecake. And me being the brilliant one that I am, I didn't think to read the directions all the way through before actually starting to cook. So I had everything ready to go and I got to the part where is says "Place pan in a larger roasting pan; fill outside pan with hot water until it comes halfway up side of springform pan" I panicked. I had no idea I had give my cheesecake a "water bath" and I certainly didn't have a pan large enough to make this happen. So there I was with a cheesecake all ready to go in the oven, and I couldn't put it in.
Finally, we found out that you don't actually have to place the pan in water (though it is recommended to avoid cracking in the cake) but if you put a pan of water in the oven, it's supposed to do the same thing. You just need to make sure you have some sort of moisture circulating.
So What did I learn? I'm so glad you asked.
- I learned that you shouldn't try to make a Pinterest recipe on a whim you should actually plan it out.
- When you cut the recipe in half you will have the thinnest cheesecake ever known to man. And it will look funny.
- Cheesecake doesn't really smell the greatest when you take it out of the oven but it will taste scrumptious.
- Cooking a cheesecake takes a lot of work
- And creates a lot of dirty dishes
- You don't actually need to cool your cheesecake for 8 hours
- Cooking can be fun
Have your tried you hand at anything adventurous in the kitchen lately? I'd love to hear about it! Comment bellow!!
