Sunday, March 22, 2009

IF YOU'VE GOTTA, USE RICOTTA

It's hard to believe that another weekend has come and gone. With the hectic nature of the week, Jeff and I gleefully look forward to sleeping in and lounging on Saturdays and Sundays, only to find that we always have something to do......and with our internal clocks set fairly early, sleeping in never works out for us anyway. But we always find something fun to do, so that's a good thing.

Today, I kept my mother in law company as she baked her first cheese cake. There was much trepidation, since she was baking it for the "Grand Cheesecake Bakeoff" that her job is holding tomorrow. I give her a lot of credit, considering that I probably wouldn't have the guts to enter a competition for something I have never done before. Lasagna, maybe. Chocolate toffee macademia nut cookies? Deinitely. Cheesecake......not on your life! But her peering at her recipe and carefully measuring and mixing as I sat on the sideline knitting and cheering her on, she made out just fine.

The recipe she tried apparently uses fresh ricotta cheese as opposed to the traditional cream cheese which one would find in a New York Style cheesecake. And there is just a very small amount of graham cracker crust along the edges to give your palate just a hint of crunchy goodness. Catastrophe almost hit when she discovered that not only had she forgotten to put sugar in the mix, she had not a granule of sugar in the sugar jar. I offered to make a quick run to the store but not before we scoured every cabinet in the house. She found a bag of pure cane sugar and decided that it would work just as well. So that is what she used.

Since we've never made a cheesecake before, I think we were both a little surprised to see that it would take 2 and a half hours to bake this calorie packed delicacy.....and even MORE surprised when she had to leave it in for another half an hour because her oven wasn't cooking it as fast as the recipe book thought it should.

Three hours later, joy to the cheese loving world, the cheesecake was done!
It doesn't look half bad, if I do say so myself.


She had to let it cool before she removed the spring pan, and then I think she is going to drizzle a homemade raspberry sauce over the top. Yum. I am really proud of her, whether she wins the bake off or not. Either way, I hope she has leftovers.

~T

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