Say Cheese... Cake

Cheesy as it may sound, or is it actually cheesy to say it out loud, or should I just say CHEESE? Are you getting the gist what I am trying to get at? I guess you’ll eventually get it, but for now I guess I am deviating from the topic, or I am actually speaking random gibberish?

Ok, so to get to the point, baking has been quiet therapeutic especially during this lockdown situation, when find yourself quarantined in your house, though you still make trips to put together household essentials. So after you have baked buns, chocolate ganache tarts, biscuits, the natural thing is to try your hand at baking a cake. But why go with a normal cake, how about baking a cheesecake?

Your first step is to find a recipe that you can follow. Once the recipe has been zeroed in, you read and re-read to make sure you are aware of the list of ingredients and have memorised the steps to prepare your cake (even though you will spend time referring to it during the duration of your bake).

So you make a couple of trips down (and here you were supposed to be quarantined) to put together the ingredients. After standing in a line for almost an hour, or what felt like an hour (cause time doesn’t go fast when you’re not having fun) only find out that they don’t have cream cheese, your core ingredient, which ends up getting your panties in a bunch (was I even wearing one 😉). But since you are hell bent on baking, you pick up the next best thing you think you can substitute for the ingredient. 

When you reach home, all tired and sweaty, you google ways to make cream cheese, and you figure out you can make it home. So off you go (so much for being quarantined) to get milk and vinegar. Once back you set yourself to the task of splitting the milk and trying to make some cream cheese (which suspiciously tasted a bit like a better version of paneer). And you stir and stir and stir, till the milk splits. After draining the water (which mom insisted on storing, as it could be used as butter milk) and letting leftover content cool and then putting it through the food processor (read mixer) to prepare you very own homemade creamy cheese (how cheesy of you). So problem solved, and the cheesecake’s back on the plate (at least the idea of baking it).

Now that the problem of the cream cheese was solved it was time to prepare base from Oreo cookies and butter, and me desperately fighting the urge of consuming some of the cookies. Putting together the ingredients for the base brought up another problem, I didn’t have tray to bake a cake and the pie dish I thought I would bake it in turned out to be too big. So in the end had to use my tart trays instead. 

Once the base was ready it was time to let it cool in the fridge (in this heat I would love to be the one cooling in the fridge). While the base rested (and I didn’t), it was time to get the filling together. So taking the freshly made and cooled cream cheese (which was lesser than what the recipe called for but still decided to go ahead with the bake anyway), and the other ingredients, you prepare your filling. You then take out the bases from the fridge and you pour the filling into the trays only for you to realise that you  didn’t have sufficient base for your filling. So after you fill the trays to the brim (another of your silly mistakes) you let the rest go down the hatch (read, into your mouth, down your throat and into your tummy).

While the trays were being filled, the oven was getting warmed up (or in baking lingo, preheated) and the water for the water-bath was getting ready (cause apparently the cake cooks well in a water bath). Once all the stars aligned together, it was time to bake. Ok there was nothing to do with the stars aligning together. Once everything was ready it was time to bake.

I tried hard to be steady and not let the filling leak out into the bath water and water spill on the floor and in the overnight. But no matter how hard you try you’ll still have some spill over, thanks to your unsteadiness. Finally you manage to get it in the oven and set the timer and let it bake. 

While your cheesecakes are baking in the oven (you have two those), you go about doing the time pass you do. You keep an eye on the cakes as they bake while going about your daily chores. After an hour of baking, you set the timer for another thirty minutes cause you oven doesn’t have a 90 minutes timer and that how long you need the cake to bake. You let them bake a little longer till the filling turns brown.

Once the 90 minutes are up (where exactly did time go), you let the trays be in the oven for sometime (read an hour). After an hour, you take them from the over and keep it on the rack till it cools down to room temperature. When they are cooled you transfer them to the fridge to let them cool down further (they seem to be getting more rest than you).

After a good four hours of refrigeration you remove one of trays from the fridge because let’s face it what use is baking if you can’t click and post it as part of your lockdown diaries. As you try to get the cake out of the mould, you try and do this as gently as possible. But then the cake won’t leave the mould without a fight and threatens to crack under pressure. But somehow you manage to get it off the mould, with a little part still sticking to it. Once off the mould, it was time to say Cheese... Cake, and then enjoy the labour of love for baking.