We made a cheesecake!

It is a rare thing when you sit down with another person and instantly know that you are both thinking the same thing at the same moment.  From the smile on our faces, the sparkle in our eyes, to our upraised shoulders, my husband and I were completely in sync when the astonished words finally tumbled out of our mouths at the same time: “We made a cheesecake!”

 

The last few years we have celebrated Valentine’s Day (usually a few days late) by cooking a meal that we have never made before.  This year we decided to experiment with Chicken Parmesan and make a simple cheesecake for dessert.   We considered making a fancy cheesecake like some of the ones served at the Cheesecake Factory, but decided we should start with a basic one before getting too fancy.  I found Our Best Cheesecake Recipe online and found the same recipe listed on other websites all using “best” and “favorite” in the title and hoped that this description would be true in our own concocting.

As I looked for recipes, I wasn’t sure whether I should go with one that called for sour cream or strictly stay with cream cheese.  There are so many different styles of basic cheesecake recipes that it was hard to pick.  (A future post may discuss the differences between New York Style, Manhattan Style, and any other styles I come across, but for now I will focus on the recipe I chose.)  I read somewhere that the sour cream adds a tartness that pairs well with the creaminess of the cream cheese.  For some reason this idea wasn’t appealing mentally; however, every time I thought about the tartness my salivary glands reacted and eventually changed my mind.  Who knew that the salivary gland would have this much power!?  It may be mind over matter, but salivary secretions over mind? Weird.

At any rate, I decided to use the sour cream.  I mixed the cream cheese batter, while the husband took on the graham cracker crust.  He did an excellent job crushing the graham crackers into a near dust and then mixing them with melted butter.  Together, we pushed the crumbs into a pie plate (I don’t own a spring form pan, so I improvised with the pie plate) and created the crust.  We then poured the drippy batter into the crust and baked it.  Because I didn’t have the right kind of pan, there was more batter than would fit into the crust so we poured it into 4 ramekins to make mini crust-less cheesecakes. After baking for an hour, cooling for another hour, the husband transferred them all to the refrigerator to cool overnight.

In the morning, I cheated and tasted one of the mini cheesecakes for quality control purposes (wink, wink).  What kind of wife would I be if I gave the husband food that tasted bad?  It was, of course, for purely selfless reasons that I had to taste the cheesecake. The cheesecake looked and even felt heavy, so I was suspicious that it would taste that way too.  It didn’t taste heavy though.  Instead, it tasted rich with creamy vanilla flavors and just enough tartness to make it interesting. My taste test locked in my decision to make a cherry pie sauce.

And so after we finished eating our not so impressive Chicken Parmesan, we delved into our cheesecake with much enthusiasm. We each tasted a creamy bite with warm cherry almond sauce, looked into each others’ eyes, and with much love and excitement somehow muttered “We made a cheesecake!” before quickly filling our spoons with a much bigger portion and eating it too.