Thursday, November 24, 2011

In which there is more of an actual recipe

Okay, welcome to part two of "learning to bake from a college student whose cupboard is full of instant noodles and oatmeal."

Now that you have your crust cooling, your cream cheese softened, and your sweet potatoes cooked nice and mushy, it's time to assemble everything. Brush the cookie crumbs out of that mixing bowl and put the peeled sweet potatoes in it. Make sure they're peeled right, with no gross bits or buds or eyes or whatever. Flecks of un-mashed potato are okay, big stringy chunks of stuff are not. Mashing them with sour cream makes things go a little smoother, and it makes the mashed parts paler than the rest so the chunks stand out and can be mercilessly pureed.


Okay, mash that stuff up and put it in a bowl, or maybe whatever you used to melt the butter in for the crust. Now dump all that cream cheese into your once-more-empty mixing bowl. If you have a real actual mixer, then by all means use that, but otherwise get ready to build some superhero arm-muscles.


If you have brown sugar, you'll want to add a bit over half a cup of that. Or, use white sugar and pour in some molasses. You can make pretty shapes if you want before you mix it all into a mush.


Add enough to make it a nice sort of silly-putty shade.


Mix it really well at this and subsequent stages, cream-cheese chunks are sort of off-putting. Now you need about three eggs; two is enough for two packages of cheese, four if they're medium and you're using three packages. 


Bystanders tensely awaiting the arrival of all the king's horses and all the kings men. Okay, now you're adding them one at a time, so if it's looking too runny at some point just don't add another one.


Once those are all mixed in and it's fluffy and lump-free, pour in whatever fall spices you want. Pretty much the same as for pumpkin, though I prefer more ginger and no allspice for sweet potatoes.


Pour all that in, whatever amounts look good.


Mix in a cup or so of sweet potato, break out the masher again if it's really lumpy.


Pour it on that crust you made a little while ago.


Have some leftover mashed potatoes while you wait, throw on a little molasses or black pepper or whatever floats your boat.


Cook it till it looks less like clam chowder and more like this.


You may want to put a pan under it, buttery crusts drip and start little mini fireworks in your oven. :)
I left mine in for about 45 minutes at 375, and the edges were getting pretty done so I went for 20 or so minutes at 300, then it sat in the oven for a while to cool off. Basically, it should be springy but not too jiggly, and a knife stuck in the middle should not come out covered in greasy soup. You can get fancy with water baths and all that, but why bother when you can just chuck it in the oven? You can even re-cook it a while at a low temp if it's not done in the middle. It's cheesecake, it's gonna be awesome no matter what. Letting it cool is the tough part, I usually make mine a day before but you can skimp on that and try a slice as soon as it's stopped feeling warm to the touch. Now you need to prepare the caramel sauce:


C'mon, you just made a whole cheesecake from scratch, did you really think I'd make you whip up a batch of caramel sauce too? Now drench that masterpiece in liquid caramel and have at it before anyone else finds out it's done.


Thanksgiving recipes? From the lizard girl?

I know, it just doesn't sound safe. Particularly since I currently have a Rubbermaid container full of live insects feasting on the scraps generated by this recipe. Don't worry, no pictures of them. Lots of other pics though, so I'll probably split this up a bit!

Well, this year I made sweet potato cheesecake with gingersnap crust and caramel sauce. I also did this last year, but now I actually know more or less how to prepare it.

So first, put on some festive baking music or something. 


Next you need take the cream cheese out to soften. I used about 2 and a half 8-oz packages -- you can use three if you have 'em, two if you don't happen to have 4 oz. left over from making crab rangoon.


If you're feeling super ambitious, you can even have them all be the same brand, but that requires planning and stuff. Next, you need a couple sweet potatoes, or one crazy big-a ... mazing sweet potato.


That's not all forced perspective with the cream cheese packages, it weighed well over a pound. You can bake it if you have time, or boil it or microwave it or whatever. Just get it cooked all the way through. Don't start mixing stuff in your mixing bowl yet though, you need that for the gingersnap crumbs. By the way, you need ~2 cups of gingersnap crumbs. More is generally better if you want the crust to go up the sides a little.


Then you need to melt 5 T or so of butter, less usually works just fine.


You're mixing food and stuff now, so tie back that unruly hair or people are gonna get grossed out thinking there might be hair in their food.


Once you've spent like half an hour taking pictures of all this, stop for a minute and think whether you're supposed to be writing a 5-page proposal essay today. If you are, take a five-minute research break.


Whew, that was exhausting. Back to the important stuff. If your gingersnaps aren't very sweet, pour some sugar in there.


Mix it up till it's all sparkly.


If it looks like there's too much butter at this stage, add more gingersnaps. If you have no capacity to plan for the future and already ate the rest of the batch, you big giant hog, just pour a little more sugar in there and hope for the best. Now you need to squish it into the cheesecake pan. You can use plastic, like this ginormous bag.


Or if it's just for family, do it the normal way.


Bake that for a while, five or six minutes maybe, till it's kind of crunchy but not burnt. Congrats, you've started the cheesecake and finished a gingersnap crust! I could have just said "make a graham cracker crust, but with gingersnaps" ... but that takes the suspense out of it. Next up is the cheesecake itself.