alas

Alas. I have failed. My latest endeavour to create the perfect cheesecake has unfortunately turned out less than what I had hoped for.
The original plan: Try out my mother's 3 favourite cheesecake recipes and fuse them all together in an attempt to construct the ideal method to produce the smoothest, creamiest and most delicious baked cheesecake ever.
The actual plan: Bake 3 cheesecakes by fighting off the family from either eating all the cream cheese, removing the cake from the oven to make space for actual food and the most challenging of all - prevent everyone from eating the cake until it has set.
The main moral that I learnt from this whole experience was that making a cheesecake is both expensive and time consuming. Cheesecake number 1 had to be baked with fat free cottage cheese and greek yogurt instead of cream. This wasn't my idea but all the yummy food had already been eaten by the time I got home. I had to make do. Needless to say that number 1 came out less than perfect. Imagine baked cottage cheese - how it separates and curdles some more... that is what it was like. Terrible. |Almost put me off baking forever. (Like that's ever possible)
For cheesecake number 2 I was determined to use real cream cheese and real cream. I went to she shop after work and proceeded the hide the ingredients I had bought from the family (with much effort) until the time came to bake. The cheesecake was wonderful (in comparison to the other). It was smooth and creamy with only 2 major flaws: A massive three-way crack on the cake and to further ruin my hard work, the crust tasted like bread. It appears that is what happens when you forget to add the sugar...
For the third and final attempt I was determined to get the texture right. And the crust. Unfortunately neither quite made the standard I should consider decent. In a desperate effort to make a crust that is both crispy and does not taste like bread I used my trusty lemon meringue pastry. But as it turns out, the sides just flop in if you try to blind bake it in a dish higher than a tart dish. So. Armed with a semi-baked crust and creamed cottage cheese I was sure this one wouldn't crack like my last one. Sadly, however, I seemed to have overcompensated and the cake turned out just as semi-cooked as the crust and no one felt like waiting for it to set.
My final attempt was mindlessly devoured (at least by family who love me too much to tell me how horrible it was) on a summer evening by the pool where the conversation turned out much better than the cake had.