Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Book Club and High Pressure Cheesecake

Tonight I hosted book club at my house. We read Room by Emma Donoghue. It was very good, you should read it!

Hosting book club is not all fun and games though, first you have to clean, and you also need to provide some delicious dessert. I spent some time cleaning today and as soon as Adele came in the door from daycare she undid all of the putting away I had just done... seriously, it probably took her less than 60 seconds to do this...


GAAAH. She wasn't the only one though, I left the bag full of kitchen trash outside the back door and then forgot I'd done that and accidentally let Brodie go out there unsupervised. Rookie mistake. When I let him back inside again there was disgusting trash from end to end of the yard and it took me significantly longer to clean it all up again than it would have to just take it all the way to the bin in the first place. Double GAAAH.

Ok, so cleaning was a struggle and that only leaves dessert. Ben doesn't like cheesecake and I love cheesecake with the passion of a thousand burning suns, so I thought I'd make cheesecake! Yum! I'd made it once before but when I looked at the recipe it asked for FIVE blocks of cream cheese and needed me to begin at least 24 hours ahead so I found a different recipe online.

From today's cheesecake making experience I hereby decree that the standards by which you judge the perfection of a cheesecake be amended.

Apparently a perfect cheesecake is totally smooth, and not browned, curdled or cracked. I disagree. Here's the new rating scale.

1. Cheesecake is not browned, curdled or cracked, is flat on top, crust comes evenly up the sides. You have obviously been spending too much time practicing making cheesecake. I bet you even cooked it in a water bath, you fancy pants. You clearly don't have little kids trying to pull your pants down as you stand by the stove. Your dog can't possibly have strewn trash all over the yard minutes before the cheesecake was due to come out of the oven. I bet your house is always clean and you take daily showers.

Your cheesecake is worth 0 points.

2. Your cheesecake is kind of brown on top and cracked because you googled "how to tell when cheesecake is done" after it was already past the point when you should have removed it from the oven. Your oven smells terrible and smokes like crazy when it gets hot now because it turns out your springform pan doesn't fit together quite right since your toddler used it for some kind of hoopla game and the batter dripped through onto the bottom of the oven. It still tastes good though and you can hide the cracks with a bunch of toppings. I achieved level 2 today, here's a picture.


Your cheesecake is worth 100 points.

3. Your cheesecake went horribly wrong and was totally inedible so you bought one from the store instead and picked up a bottle of wine while you were out anyway. You got home and realized that your shirt was on inside out and had someone else's snot on it. You don't even care any more.

Your cheesecake is worth 1000 points! You win. Lets get together and eat some. I'll bring wine too so we each have a bottle. Happy days.





2 comments:

Tanya Cothran said...

Love it! And I love cheesecake too! Yours looks excellent anyway.

kateks said...

Audrey says your cheesecake is worth double points if she can try some. :)