How to Make Cheesecake Without a Springform Pan

[Edit: This has been my most popular blog post due to what I presume is people googling "How to make cheesecake without a springform pan". If that is how you got here, welcome. While I don't know of any way to make a round cheesecake without a springform pan, I do know how to make Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles which are pretty delicious and I imagine could be made without the chocolate. I talk about them below with a few tips for baking them but the recipe can be found here. If this link was helpful to you, I only ask that you pick another of my posts and read it and decide if this blog is worth your time. Thanks and happy baking!]

Hello all! For this week's project, I decided to deviate a bit from the cookies. I've been craving some cheesecake lately but alas, I have no springform pan. Plus it's harder to bring a cheesecake into the office to share with people. Then I'd have to worry about plates and utensils and that's currently beyond the scope of things I care about. Fortunately for me, the Bake Sale cookbook came through for me. In the bar cookie section (yes, that is a specific section) I found "Swirl of Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles" which was exactly perfect.

So, naturally, after choosing this recipe I had to head over to my friendly neighborhood Big Y to pick up some things, namely, graham crackers, cream cheese, and evaporated milk (the recipe called for the brand name Carnation but I bought the cheap Big Y brand). By the way, does anyone else find evaporated milk kind of odd? It kinda creeps me out that all you have to do is add water and then it's supposedly the equivalent of fresh milk. Weird. Anyway, while I was picking up the creepy milk, a box next to it caught my eye. This magical box read: "Graham Cracker Crumbs".  Yes, they actually sell graham cracker crumbs for budding bakers like myself. So, I was immediately faced with a decision to make. Should I do things the old fashioned way and crush up 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs? Or should I pay a slightly higher unit price and save myself the time? While trying to decide, I was reminded of the last time I made cheesecake. In that instance, the person designated to crush the graham crackers took approximately 45 minutes to do so. While I certainly would have gotten it done faster than that, I decided that the time and effort saved would be better spent working on my probability homework. So I took the easy way out and went off to the kitchen.

The first step was to make the graham cracker crust. I know from experience that this is super easy so I felt good about that. I melted some butter and mixed it up with the graham cracker crumbs and sugar and it was a piece of (cheese)cake. The next direction was to press the crust into the bottom of a 13x9 inch baking pan. Who's betting at this moment that I don't have one of those? Well, you'd be WRONG! I have one rectangle baking pan and it is exactly 13x9! How exciting! This recipe seems to be going flawlessly for me.

Spoke too soon. The filling was easy, just combining cream cheese, sugar, flour, evaporated milk, eggs, and vanilla. On a related note, I hit a milestone in my baking. I finally finished my first bottle of vanilla extract! I feel like that means I actually have accumulated some experience by now. Speaking of experience, you know how I have to melt chocolate for pretty much every recipe I bake? Well, I should have used my experience in that area and deviated from the recipe. The recipe told me to microwave the Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels (Hey, a brand name I did use!) and it gave me specific microwaving directions. I followed them and ended up with a lumpy, congealed mass of chocolate in my bowl. After trying unsuccessfully to melt the chocolate further, I threw my hands up and used the tried and true bowl of hot water technique. In a couple of minutes, I successfully melted my chocolate and vowed not to microwave chocolate anymore. Oh, and lest you think something went smoothly, in the process of stirring my chocolate, I managed to splash extremely hot water all over my shirt. Yay.

So, the swirl of chocolate aspect comes into this recipe in this way: I was supposed to combine one cup of the cream cheese mixture with the chocolate, pour the remaining cream cheese mixture into the pan, pour the chocolate/cream cheese mixture on top, and then use a spoon to pull the plain cream cheese mixture over the chocolate mixture. Whew. It seemed needlessly complicated but I guess I did get a nice marble-y swirl. And now, into the oven for 45 minutes. I used the baking and cooling time to watch a couple of episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. Yep, I unashamedly watch bad tv.

One note on the baking: by the time I pulled the pan out of the oven it had risen to slightly above the rim of the pan. But by the time I went back to it after the cooling time, imagine my surprise when I found it had all sunk down back to the original level! Regardless, it still smells delicious. Unfortunately, I have to wait a bit for the cheesecake to chill in the fridge before I can eat it.

::twiddles thumbs::

Yay, they're chilled! Cutting these was a bit of a challenge. Not because they were hard to cut but because the triangles were really big and for some reason the graham cracker crust was really really crumbly. I'm not sure why that is but the crust definitely leaves something to be desired. As far as look goes, you be the judge:

I think they look cute. As far as taste goes, the graham cracker crust is a bit too dry and crumbly for my taste so maybe the graham cracker to butter ratio was off (though I swear I followed the recipe!) and it's actually a bit too chocolatey for me. I guess I'm more of a cheesecake purist and like it the plain way. Also, due to the crumbly crust, this is best eaten with a fork. That should get interesting when I bring these to colloquium.

Critical Reception:


Well, the peanut butter cup cookies were here one second and gone the next. I put them out at colloquium and many of them were gone before I even showed up to get my cup of tea. Overall positive reviews though. One ambiguous review: one person (that I know of) did not realize that they were eating peanut butter cookies. After reading the blog entry, this person wanted to try one, not realizing that he/she had eaten a couple of the cookies two days earlier. Maybe I should start labeling what I put out?

Another Sticky Situation

In this week's episode of "things that are really annoying to measure" I bake cookies that involve peanut butter. The technical name for this recipe is "Canned Peanut Butter Candy Cookies" from the Favorite Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook.  This will require some explanation.  The idea for these cookies must be that they make a lovely gift for someone because the recipe calls for a decorative container.  The picture in the book shows one of those cylindrical metal tins with adorable ribbons wrapped around it.  Awww.  Apparently you are supposed to measure the cookies to precisely fit inside the canister.  I don't even have to tell you by now that I did not do this.  I did not have one of these tins and I tend to feed the statistics masses who would only find the tin to be a hindrance.

So that was the first unusual thing about this recipe.  The second unusual thing to me is that despite this being the BRAND NAME cookbook, the recipe never once mentions Reese's peanut butter cups.  The name of the recipe refers to Reese's as peanut butter candies and the ingredient list calls for "quartered miniature peanut butter cups". Now I'm not really a huge candy eater but seriously, does anybody else even make peanut butter cups? Anybody? The recipe is unquestionably calling for Reese's peanut butter cups (even the picture looks exactly like Reese's miniatures) but in the very first recipe of the Brand Name cookbook, they do not refer to the brand. Am I the only person who finds this absurd? Did Reese's refuse to allow their brand name to be used? And if so, why? Hershey's is mentioned several times in the book and Hershey's owns Reese's, right? I'm not entirely sure why this bugs me quite this much but it seems very silly to me. On to the cooking!

I started work on these cookies yesterday, not quite sure when I was going to bake them. What I did know was that I had to buy Reese's, I mean, "miniature peanut butter cups" and quarter them. So I decided to get a jump start on that.  I know from baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch that one 12 oz bag of chocolate chips is 2 cups so I assumed about the same for quartered miniature Reese's. Which meant a lot of unwrapping. Think about it: each miniature Reese's has the tinfoil wrapping and the paper wrapping and there's a lot of mini Reese's in a 12 oz bag. But that's ok, I parked myself in front of the tv and watched Biggest Loser while unwrapping and cutting my candies. =)

Once I was done, I decided I was bored and decided to just go ahead and bake them. Step 1: beat peanut butter and butter in a large bowl. Otay. I had to measure out 3/4 cup of chunky peanut butter. I'm a smooth peanut butter girl myself so I didn't have chunky but I'm fairly sure it's one of those things that wouldn't have mattered. By the way, in case you were wondering, the recipe did not specify a brand of peanut butter. Knowing that peanut butter is sticky, I tried to devise a plan to minimize my suffering. I decided to line the measuring cup with wax paper so it would be easier to transfer after measuring.  This actually worked pretty well. It was a challenge to see the measurements though because I have a stupid Pyrex measuring cup that put the measurement information on the inside. I'm still confused as to why someone would do that. But anyway, success. From there it was your standard brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, etc etc. After I stirred in the peanut butter cups, I let the dough chill for 1 hour.

The baking side of things, on the other hand, had some fascinating instructions.  Remember how I said that the cookies should fit nicely inside the decorative container? Well, the recipe gives specific instructions about how if you make a 1/4 inch thick disc of dough, 2 inches less in diameter than the size of the container then the cookie will grow to...blah blah blah. It actually wanted me to bake a test cookie to figure out the proper size of the cookies. This was all easy to disregard but my eye caught on one thing. It recommended using 1/3 cup of dough PER COOKIE. Think about that for a second. If volume doesn't give you a sense of the size of these cookies, how about that the recipe yields 9 5-inch cookies? Those would be big freakin cookies. Those are like those cookies you see at diners wrapped in plastic that you can't picture anyone eating. If you still can't picture the size, how about that with the amount of dough I had, I made 2 and a half DOZEN cookies. Ok, that's all I'll say about the idiotic size of the cookies.

After baking, the last thing to do was decoratively pipe chocolate onto the cookies.  However, it was late at night by then so I decided to save that step for today.  So, today I followed the very specific instructions about melting chocolate in a plastic bag in the microwave. For once I didn't have to use chocolate chips in the recipe! Instead I melted a Hershey's bar. The directions for melting were pretty good actually. After melting, I was to cut a tiny corner of the plastic bag to turn it into a piping bag. Unfortunately, I cut the hole a little too large so the first couple cookies have overly thick piped chocolate on them.  Then I decided to cut the other corner of the bag to make thinner lines of chocolate.  Yay! That worked well. Of course, I ended up with hands covered in melted chocolate again as usual. I was then instructed to let the cookies stand until the chocolate had set.  20 minutes later the chocolate had not set but colloquium was drawing near so I tossed the cookies in the fridge to speed the process. That worked ridiculously well and was what I should have done in the first place.  Oh, and I tasted one too. Yummy. They tasted less peanut butter-y than I expected, considering all the peanut butter, but they were quite good. So here they are, my cute peanut butter candy cookies:

Oh, and by the way, this recipe ultimately never referred to any brand of anything.

Critical Reception:
The blondie brownies made their way to the statistics picnic on Saturday.  Once people discovered that it was ok to take the plastic wrap off and once people discovered that blondie brownies are not dark chocolate brown in color, nor are they chocolate chip cookies...the brownies went pretty quickly. I received a few compliments and a few "I want to try whatever you made!" so overall I put it down as a win. Considering my brownies were competing with copious amounts of food, I was just happy they got eaten at all between soccer games.