cheesecake! [recipe review]

faulty recipe. delicious graham crackers.

a recipe review and, well, the story of my first cheesecake.

for one of our most unique and creative wedding gifts, my friends gave hubs and me a mason jar filled with slips of paper, each with a cute little something on it: something i do for j, something j does for me, or something we do for each other. last week's slip was that i'd bake j man his favorite cake.

after much deliberation, he settled on a cheesecake. i have never made a cheesecake before, and had recently read/ drooled over a recipe review posted over at one of the food blogs i frequent. i decided i was up to the challenge and that new york cheesecake sounded both the tastiest and most fool-proof.

not sure why this is rotated? delicious: 2.5 lbs of cream cheese.

our oven set to prove me wrong. but i'll get to that in a bit.

the review i read said that the recipe from cook's illustrated was delicious, and, cheapskate that i am (i blame my dutch heritage), i was not about to pay for a recipe directly from their site that i could find elsewhere via some random googling. so, i found what i was looking for here, made a trip to the store and got started.

so i'm following, i'm following, i'm following the recipe and then, i realize, i get to the end of the directions and have all these ingredients left. mr pro chef joe forgot about the egg yolks, etc in his directions. i threw everything in my mixing bowl that i had left over and hoped for the best- the crust turned out so delicious that i ate it with a fork. (hard to go wrong with graham crackers, sugar and butter.)

the batter was so good we ate it from the bowl. with spoons.

directions for baking: put the cake in the oven at 500 degrees. after 10 minutes, WITHOUT OPENING THE OVEN!!!!!, turn the oven down to 250 and bake for an hour and a half. why the caps? because my cheesecake was doomed. our oven started billowing smoke due to some leftover oven-fry residue (that recipe for another time.) aka, sticky, blackening oil. all over the bottom of our oven. needless to say, we opened the oven. we even took the cake out. we then brought it over to our neighbor's and borrowed his oven for an hour and a half. at this point, i figured it was screwed up but maybe salvageable. hubs went over to get the cake when it was supposed to be done and brought it back over- it was still liquid lava. i popped it back in our oven for a half an hour (no smoke!) and figured it was a crap shoot. the cake billowed up and cracked, and when i pulled it out again it was still liquid lava.

i almost trashed it. hubs, though, is more level headed than i am. i went to bed. he set an alarm for 2 hours and got up to put this in the fridge after it had cooled. much to my surprise, the next morning we had a cheesecake! and it even looked pretty! AND, it tasted delicious! no oven-fry smoke, no dried out cheesecake, nothing!

i will definitely make this again. i will find another version of the recipe so as to add everything in the correct order, make sure the oven is clean, and definitely do it again. and next time, i want to add graham cracker topping, because the crust really is my favorite.

and apparently, these little buggers are much heartier than everyone who writes about them thinks they are. :)

*kandyce in denver, CO