Once again, we have a tale of substitutions. I was supposed to make Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies to use for the crust. I didn't feel like making those cookies for the fourth time. Maybe some other time, but not now. So I decided to substitute a plain old graham cracker crust instead. There ended up being two problems with that. The first was that I needed 2.5 cups of graham cracker crumbs. I ended up only having slightly less than 2 cups. Hmm. I refused to go back out to the store but I found chocolate graham crackers in the cabinet. So, I figured, mixing them couldn't be bad, right? Right. So that's what I did. Not an insurmountable problem but a hurdle nonetheless.
The second, and slightly more significant, problem was that I was following the recipe in the book for the graham cracker to butter ratio. I suppose that crushed cookies have a very different quality compared to graham crackers because the recipe called for 3 tablespoons of butter. After melting the butter and mixing it in, the crumbs should have been able to be molded. Not a chance. I ended up using a whole stick of butter for my crust. Ultimately, I really should have looked for a different recipe for a crust instead of just guessing but it worked out fine in the end and I was too lazy to look up a recipe.
So, the crust goes into the freezer to chill while I make the filling. The filling is basically a ton of cream cheese, white chocolate, and eggs. After measuring out 1 3/4 lbs of cream cheese (and mixing it a little to soften it up better), I set up the chocolate in the double boiler to melt. A bit of heavy cream and EIGHTEEN ounces of white chocolate. That's a lot of chocolate. And, I learned my lesson about using good white chocolate instead of crappy white chocolate so I got some nice Ghirardelli's for the occasion. While that melted, I mixed up the cream cheese, sugar, and salt, followed by a half dozen eggs. Literally. I should point out that during all of this, I was trying to work as quickly as possible because it was already about 4 pm and the cheesecake takes about 7 hours to bake and cool. As it was, by my calculations, I'd still be dealing with this cheesecake at midnight. My calculations were correct.
Anyway, I poured in the melted chocolate and some vanilla extract and voila! That was all the ingredients. I poured the mixture into the springform pan and was ready to bake. Now check out these baking instructions: "Place a baking sheet with sides partially filled with 4 cups of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven. Place the springform pan on the center rack of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 250° and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 225° and bake for 15 minutes. Then lower the temperature to 200°, and bake the cheesecake until the internal temperature of the cheesecake filling reaches 170°, about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Turn off the oven and allow the cheesecake to remain in the oven undisturbed for an additional 2 hours. Remove from the oven and cool at room temperature for 1 hour. Refrigerate the cheesecake for 12 hours (do not remove the cake from the pan)." Do you understand now why I was in such a hurry? I wanted this cheesecake to be perfect and it had to be pretty constantly monitored.
Sometime around midnight, I moved the cheesecake into the fridge to chill. My boyfriend and I both worriedly noted that the cake still seemed well, not liquidy, but definitely not as solid as one would expect from a cheesecake. I figured that maybe it would firm up in the fridge (since it would be hanging out in there for at least twelve hours).
It chilled longer than twelve hours because on Friday I went to the 2012 USA Curling National Tournament in Pennsylvania. Yes, that's right. I went to watch curling for a full day. And it was awesome. Don't judge.
On Saturday morning, there was one final step to complete. I had to coat the cake with some ganache. I had a ton of Ultimate Ganache in my freezer so I figured that I would substitute the Ultimate for the plain old Chocolate Ganache that the recipe called for. Plus, my crust was a lot less chocolatey than the recipe had specified so it couldn't hurt, right? So, I just have to re-melt my ultimate ganache and...oh yeah, crap, I left it in Connecticut. And I'm in New Jersey. Score. So what does the baker do? She makes more, of course! That process went smoothly so there wasn't much to tell.
Finally, it was time to cut and eat the cake. Sadly, I forgot to bring candles so we had to make do with a tealight placed on top of the cake. Nevertheless, we cut into it and...horror. You could see the fear in everyone's eyes. It did not, in fact, firm up as it chilled. The cheesecake ended up being more like a pudding in the middle than a cake. We passed slices around anyway and I dove right in for a taste. And it was delicious. I mean, really heavenly good. I ate two slices. And you all know that I don't really have a sweet tooth. So pudding or not, the cake was a hit because the taste was so good. My theories on the consistency include a) the huge amount of melted white chocolate just makes it that way and b) my mom's oven temperatures aren't correct. But here's a couple pictures:
A couple of notes: First, I could have used some more graham cracker crust because (as you can see) it didn't make it all the way up the sides of the whole cake. Second, I was supposed to top the cake with white chocolate curls. That didn't happen because I'm lazy and because I didn't have a block of white chocolate with which to make the white chocolate curls. Lastly, on some of my more recent projects: my mom and great aunt adored the pignoli cookies and said they were perfect. That's good because I hated them. There was consensus that the Martha snickerdoodles were better, though the JoC ones weren't bad. And, the highlight of my week: after eating a couple of snickerdoodles at pre-colloquium tea, one of the professors exclaimed that the cookies were not i.i.d. and discussed with another professor whether they were mixture normal or stratified cookies. If you get that, you're a nerd, and you have my pity.
A Disney Moment: The Rescuers
Here we go with a couple of awful movies. The Rescuers had a couple of fundamental flaws and generally was just sort of...there. Nothing exceptional. Nothing to make you remember it. Certainly nothing to warrant a sequel (unless the purpose of the sequel is to give the protagonists a second chance to get it right). The premise isn't bad: a UN of mice rescuing kids. The main problem though, is that you don't even really see the girl they're rescuing until over halfway through the movie. So you can never develop an emotional attachment to her. And then, when you do see her, she comes up with her own plan for her rescue. She doesn't even need the mice! She did everything herself and she was occasionally just really dumb.
Also, why are all the animals the same size??? The mouse, rabbit, owl, turtle, and mole are all exactly the same size! That doesn't make any sense! That fact annoyed me quite a bit so this movie ranks a 4/5.
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