maddie

I think this is my second time making the Basque cheesecake and it turned out pretty fantastic albeit with some funny issues. I wanted to attempt it again now that I've got better fundamentals for cheesecakes (e.g. always mix on low speed so you don't accidentally whip air in) so this time it just--

IT WAS LEAKING.

I bought these baking tins second hand 15 years ago; they've gone through so much work and I've been putting off upgrading them because baking tins are expensive. Yes, there are cheap ones around $20-30 NZD but I've played around with them and I'm rather unsatisfied with the quality. The $70 NZD ones are better, but I don't think I can justify spending that money right now.

You know how they tell you to rotate your cakes in your oven for an even bake? The picture on the left shows how uneven my oven is.

IT'S FINE.

It was only when I got to the picture on the right before I realized something had gone wrong. They're puffed up. They're not meant to be. It looks more souffle than cheesecake. So I quickly went through the recipe again, step by step. What went wrong? What variable did I change? I didn't incorporate any air during the process. I made sure everything was room temperature.

Most basque cheesecake recipes finish baking at 40 mins. It's meant to jiggle just a little bit.

My cheesecakes jiggled so much I swear they were trying to seduce me.🍈🍈

So I left them in the oven. I knew that my oven's temperature maxed out at 230C, but these were meant to bake at 245C. That's fine, I had used smaller baking tins to compensate (well, more like they were the only ones I had), and I extended the time as well.

At 1 hour of baking (twenty minutes extra), the cheesecakes were still JIGGLY.

But the tops were done and perfectly caramelized. This was the colour I wanted, so no point leaving them in. I took them out, surmising that with the extra baking time + smaller circumference of the baking tins would ensure that it was baked through no matter what.

It's done! It looked fantastic once it deflated, but I knew it shouldn't be deflating like this, since it shouldn't have puffed up to begin with.

So I thought, okay, maybe my recipe is wrong. I went and compared the recipe with 3 other basque cheesecake recipes from different chefs. After some quick math, I calculated that pretty much all of them used the same ratios of ingredients: cream cheese to heavy cream, with some variation of goat cheese or mascarpone, and most of them tend to stick with around 50g of flour (this variable surprisingly didn't change) and maybe an extra egg or so.

I let it cool for 3 hours on the counter. I tasted it. An excellent variation of flavour from the caramelized sides and those beautiful shades of golden brown and yellow. It's crispy on the outside, perfect amount of sweetness (I cut the sugar by another 10% anyway), and the texture's got a...

It, uhh, huh?

I got my friends over and served it to them. These guys are used to my shenanigans. They like to ask questions before they taste my food, but when they see me shut up and push the plate towards them, they know something's a bit off.

One of them said it was the best cheescake they ever had. Their wife squealed a bit when she bit into it.

"It's so funny!" she said. "It's cheesecake pudding!"

She wasn't wrong; it was like a cross between a custard souffle and a pudding. That's why it rose up, that's why it was so jiggly no matter how long I baked it.

So despite my confusion, they loved it. They just wanted more of this "cheesecake pudding".

After they left, I went over the recipe again. Something had to give. Was it because of NZ/AUS cream cheese being different from US cream cheese? The texture was a bit too wet, but it was still cooked through, so I didn't underbake it. Then I realized that while I added in 500 ml of cream, the recipe specified grams instead of millilitres.

That must be it, I thought. But then I googled the conversion rate. It would've only amounted to 550 grams and that's within the proper ratio compared to the other recipes I found online.

This morning, I woke up with a gasp. I had figured it out in my sleep.

When I was at the grocery store, I had grabbed whatever cream was cheapest instead of actually looking at what I was buying.

I had bought lite fresh cream instead of heavy/double cream. No wonder.

I made Preppy Kitchen's Pumpkin Cheesecake and let me tell you--those ingredient amounts are completely off. Even the video version of it says 90grams of graham crackers or speculoos/biscoff and I used at least 230grams. (90grams would get you the thinnest crust imagineable) I checked if I was using the same size cake tin as well but I had so much left over batter that I just baked another small one.

Anyway, I was going to do a writeup, but my QAnon transphobic in-laws have done a run on my mental health. I also had a recent chat with my parents and the convo ended with me asking, "Do you regret having me?" and that probably tells you how things went.

EDIT: fuck it, they don't get to win, here's some writing--this is the first time I used the famous philly cream cheese brand (it's actually really hard to get in NZ). However, there's also a huge sticker on it that says "Made in Australia". I tasted this one along with NZ made cream cheese, and the Aussie one is just softer and easier to whip. The NZ one has a bit more tang, but I could chalk both of these differences down to brands instead of NZ vs AU milk.

Instead of graham crackers I used speculoos/biscoff for more cinnamon. I also cut the sugar portion in the crust completely and it's still sweet enough. You can, however, keep the sugar amount in the batter since I cut it by 15% and thought, oh yeah, it'll be fine even if it was a bit sweeter.

Also the bottom tray is my makeshift waterbath. Since the point of a waterbath is to ensure there's steam to cook the cheesecake evenly, if you have a big enough (read: regular 60cm oven) you can just put it on the lower tray instead. I added the aluminium foil for safety juuuust in case but I could've gone without.

Taste wise, it's really interesting. This one has cream cheese, pumpkin puree, and sour cream to lighten it up. No regular cream. I also added more of my own homemade pumpkin spice blend that was like 3x the recipe amount and it's still mostly in the background. I get it though--some people just don't like cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg etc. But ginger! I did forget to add some ginger.

Also hahahaha don't use a banana bread tin like I did for leftover cheesecake batter because that thing does not pull out well. The cheesecake mostly came out intact but a good quarter of it stuck and fell out crumbled. Messy, but tasty!