Photo of the Week #3

Snow? No, no dahling; we don't do snow anymore. In the midwest, it's ice or nothing.

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Now playing: Beirut - Nantes
via FoxyTunes

Photo of the Week #2

Amassing pirate-related stuff is an obsession hobby of mine. It will most certainly be the subject of many future posts. The lighting here turned out a bit harsh on the lower right edge of the table, but for the most part I like it. No Photoshop retouching this time!

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Now playing: The Unseen - Paint It Black
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Chocolate Cheesecake

I make a pretty decent cheesecake. Or at least, people tell me I do.


I usually make it plain, with a few different fruit syrups and chocolate to put on top. One time I tried to be a bit different, and made the crust out of crushed Oreos. The end result was okay, but the process involved setting off both the fire and intruder alarms at my parents' house. At ten o'clock at night. That's a story for another time.

For some reason, I just can't help but play around with this recipe. Cheesecake is like a blank canvas - you can add pretty much anything to it, and it'll still be delicious. The cheesecake, not the canvas.

So I decide to alter the filling part and make a chocolate cheesecake. It actually wasn't that hard. I replaced some of the cream cheese with good quality chocolate and added a bit of cocoa powder. The result wasn't too strong, and it maintained the wonderful consistency of the original recipe. I'll provide both below, with the chocolate addition/substitution in parentheses.

New York Cheesecake recipe adapted from JoyOfBaking.

Ingredients:
- Crust

• 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1/4 cup granulated white sugar
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted

- Filling

• Four 8 oz. packages cream cheese, room temperature (3.5 packages)
• 1 cup granulated white sugar
• 3 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 5 large eggs, room temperature
• 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
• (4 oz. semisweet chocolate, melted)
• (1 tbsp. cocoa powder)

- Topping

• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 tbsp. granulated white sugar
• 1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Recipe:

1. Grease or spray with Pam a 9 inch springform pan. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. In a bowl, combine the crust ingredients, stirring well with a fork. Press the crust firmly into the springform pan, going up the sides about an inch. Cover and refrigerate until later.
3. For the filling, put cream cheese, sugar, and flour into a large mixing bowl. Beat on medium speed until smooth (about 2 minutes).
4. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well and scraping down the sides of the bowl after each one.
5. Add the vanilla and whipping cream (and chocolate and cocoa powder if making chocolate cheesecake) and beat until just incorporated. Take care not to overbeat, as that will put too much air into the batter, which can cause the cheesecake to crack while baking.
6. Pour the filling into the springform pan. Place that pan on a larger baking pan with a rim, and bake in the oven for 15 minutes.
7. Lower the temperature to 250 degrees and bake for another hour and a half. The center should look a little wet and the whole thing should still be a bit wobbly.
8. Remove and place on a wire rack to cool.
9. Combine topping ingredients in a small bowl and mix together with a fork. Spread the topping on the cheesecake evenly.
10. Return the cheesecake to the oven to bake for another 15 minutes.
11. Remove and run a knife around the inside of the pan to loosen the cheesecake and help prevent cracking. Let cool, then cover with foil or plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
12. Top with fresh fruit or fruit and/or chocolate syrup.
    

The experiment turned out well. The chocolate flavor was pretty subtle, and it tasted sort of like chocolate ice cream. If I were to make it again, I might add more melted chocolate to the filling and see if it tastes a bit stronger.

Photo of the Week #1

I think I'm going to try to post a photo of something, anything, at least once a week. And so, this is the first such post!

I took this as I was leaving work yesterday. The sky was a beautiful blue color, and these clouds were amazing. I suppose that's the trade-off with Missouri weather. We can go from 58 and sunny to 29 and snowing in a day* but you get wonderful cloudscapes, sunrises, and sunsets from time to time. I could definitely do without the random and severe weather changes, but this is a fair deal, at least in my opinion.

And yes, I did 'Shop this photo a bit. The colors weren't exactly how I remembered them, and I'd rather upload a file that's a few dozen kilobytes instead of a few megabytes, because honestly? That's way too many bytes.

Also! FoxyTunes is awesome, and the fact that social networking sites and things like Blogger can interact with it totally rocks my socks.

*This just happened last week. For serious.

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Now playing: Gogol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple
via FoxyTunes