Fluffy, Soft as a Cloud Soufflé Cheesecake (aka Japanese Cheesecake)

Topped with cherries in syrup. Like pie filling on a fluffy cheesecake.

For Pop's birthday, The Bat and I usually collaborate on a lemon meringue pie. For the birthdays of the young'uns, I go all out and build the cakes aimed to surprise them all.  For my birthday, I get to make my own dessert, too. I know, I know, this is all a surprise to my loyal readers (all two of you). It's a sort of rule in our house that, if you have any kitchen skills at all, and you want a cake on any birthday past your twelfth, you either go hit the local bakeries for a stock ice cream cake, or you can get fancy and make your own.

I can't eat the storebought ones. I like them, but they don't like me.

So I get to go crazy in the kitchen, and make my own.

The upside to this is that I can have whatever kind of dessert my little heart desires, and I can make it with no wheat, no other allergens, and few worries about, well…whatever.

The downside is, I have to choose between fluffy sponge cake, cheesecake, and pie. Or not.

Today, I decided to go into full, head-on hybrid mode. I made a cheese sponge cake (or, as it's known in more edumacated circles, a soufflé cake or a Japanese cheesecake), and top it with a nice pie-filling-like fruit (The Bat has some strawberries, and I have dark tart cherries). This puppy has the texture of a light and airy sponge cake, the tang of a cheesecake, and…fruit.

And I made a sour cream whipped cream topping to add to the decadence, for those people who think a birthday cake needs some kind of frosting.

But there are no candles on my cake. I don't want to burn the house down.





Soufflé Cheesecake, or Cheese Sponge Cake

Ingredients:

1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons ultrafine sugar
5 large (not jumbo!) eggs, separated
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar (I substitute 1/2 tsp rice vinegar for my own, due to an allergy)
3 Tablespoons + 1 teaspoon unsalted butter
8 oz cream cheese
1/3 cup whole milk
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/3 cup plus 2 Tablespoons Gluten-Free All-Purpose flour or GF cake flour

2 Tablespoons tapioca flour
2 Tablespoons corn starch
1/8 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325º F, with rack in center of oven.

Lightly grease bottom & sides of an 8"x2" round cake pan. Line bottom of pan with non-stick parchment. Fill a larger pan with water to about 1 centimeter, set aside.

In microwave or double-boiler, melt butter, cream cheese, and milk. Allow to cool to room temperature. Add in flours, corn starch, salt, egg yolks, and lemon juice. Mix well.

In a large bowl, beat egg whites with cream of tartar (or vinegar) until frothy. Add in sugar and whip until soft peaks form (everybody meringue!).

Add 1/3 of egg whites to cheese batter mixture, fold in completely. Add batter to meringue, fold in gently and carefully until the marbling is no longer obvious.

Scoop the mixture into the cake pan and smooth the top.

Place water pan in oven, then set cake into the water bath.

Bake cake 70 minutes, or until golden brown and set. Turn off oven. Do not open oven for at least 20 minutes. It will rise to better than double in size, but then settles back down and pull away from the sides of the pan.

Allow cake to slowly cool in oven, in water bath.

When completely cool, remove from pan by sliding a thin knife around the edges of the pan anywhere it may still be attached, to loosen the cake.

If you want to show the golden side up, turn cake out onto a plate by setting a plate over the cake in the pan and then taking a second plate, making a plate-cake-sandwich to then flip it.

It resettles once it cools down. While baking, it's a gigantic crown of gold.

 If, however, you'd like it to look less like a cakey-cake and more like a cheesecake, turn it out onto a plate and allow the golden-brown top of the cake to become the bottom crust of the cheesecake.

I like the way the parchment expanded and made these nifty striations on the base.

Refrigerate at least 3 hours before serving.

Decorate with a simple sprinkle of powdered sugar on the browned top crust (you can create a waxed paper stencil for it, or sprinkle through lace, if you want), and/or offer your favorite fruit or syrup (fruity or chocolate) as a topping, with some sour-cream-based whipped cream* (scroll all the way down).

One can not live on cake alone.

*I will recommend, though, that you let people know, in advance of their piling on the whipped cream, if you use sour cream in the mix. Otherwise, they may believe your cream has turned, and not that it's a more daring, tangy combination of flavors.

Mini-Margarita Cheesecakey Bites

Yesterday was haircut day. In this neighborhood, the genius who does the work on The Bat's and my challenging mops gets not only cash and hugs, but something a little decadent from the kitchen. Sometimes it's chocolate, sometimes it's liquor...this time, it's tequila (cue the Peewee Herman dance, and tell 'em Large Marge sent you).

Not only is it tequila, it's cheesecakes. Bite-sized. No-bake. So none of the liquor bakes out. And you can easily lose track of how much you've had.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

Another feature is, it's really a quick-and-easy process. Once I assembled the ingredients, and the cream cheese was allowed to soften to room temperature, the whole thing took only 20 minutes for me to prepare. It makes at least 7 dozen (if you have that many good, bowl-shaped tortilla scoops. Otherwise, it makes as many as you can get, plus a small bowl full of tasty, tangy dip).

There's another plus to this: the alcohol is totally optional (unless it's going to the salon)!

It's great for parties, either way, so if you have a Spring Break event, or you're thinking all the way ahead to Cinco de Mayo or graduation day, or somebody's wedding, you can make a gazillion of these in short order, either teetotalling or liquored up, and people will go bonkers.

How to drink your Margaritas without looking like you're drinking…

Mini-Margarita Cheesecakey Bites

Ingredients:

1 (10 ounce) bag tortilla "scoops" bowl-shaped chips

1 (8 ounce) packet cream cheese
1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup tequila (optional)
1/8 cup orange liqueur (optional)
1 (6 ounce) can* frozen limeade concentrate - DO NOT THAW!

Directions: 

Make sure you have room in your refrigerator.  

Set up trays of tortilla chip bowls: (I used three 12-inch pizza pans with low rims to hold them in place as I worked). Select at least 80 chips from bag, based on their shape - good, unbroken, with high sides and slightly flattened bottoms so they will hold the filling and still stand alone on a plate.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat cream cheese until it is fluffy. Add in condensed milk, beat until smooth, then mix in tequila, orange liqueur, and frozen limeade concentrate. Mix well.

Using a 2-teaspoon-sized cookie scoop like this one, or a piping bag with no special tip, fill each tortilla scoop with the batter. When each tray is completed, cover lightly with plastic and put it in the refrigerator. Allow to chill at least two hours, until mostly firm (they do not freeze very well, I'm sorry to say).

Serve topped with whipped cream. You may choose to go the lazy way & get pre-fab stuff, like the canned whipped cream, or the frozen non-dairy whipped topping, or you can, a few minutes before you're ready to serve, make some lime-whipped cream:

Special whipped cream topping:

1 pint whipping cream

2 teaspoons lime juice

1 Tablespoon ultrafine granulated sugar*

In a chilled bowl, beat whipping cream and lime juice on high until soft peaks begin to form. Sprinkle sugar into cream, continuing to beat until light and fluffy and stiff peaks begin to form - but be careful! You want to stop before it turns to butter! 

Allow your guests to apply their whipped cream on their own – from the can or with a teaspoon – then just sit back and enjoy the accolades.

*I ended up buying a 12-ounce can of limeade concentrate (that's all they had at Aldi), used half the can in the cheesecake filling, then allowed the remaining concentrate to thaw, substituted 2 Tablespoons of that for the lime juice and sugar, and made a quart of limeade, as well, to carry with me as a drink mixer for the afternoon/evening crowd.

Chocolate Cheesecake Decadence

I like the occasional cheat.  I especially like a cheat with real flavor, and no funny aftertastes.  So, when I'm not up for digging out Mom's odd little scraps of paper for the Zingermann's (excessively, dangerously rich and tasty) brownie recipe, I'm inclined to reach for a box of Ghirardelli's brownie mix.  They use top-notch ingredients, and the flavor is good enough to pass off as homemade, in a pinch.  

But, in my world, we're not allowed to use paint straight from the tube, let alone use a mix straight from the box.  If the mix is good, we throw stuff into it, and if the mix is great, we pile stuff on top of it.  Ghirardelli's usually gets toppings, like this one, which, if you like snitching chocolate cookie dough, resembles a safe version of that...  it's gooey and fudgy and rich as the dickens.

Chocolate Cheesecake Decadence

Ingredients:

7 ounces good dark chocolate (at least 65% cocoa)

3 8-ounce blocks of cream cheese (not light or fat-free) warmed to room temperature

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

3 large eggs 

1 Ghirardelli's Chocolate Supreme Brownie mix, prepared according to box instructions.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 300º.  

Prepare Ghirardelli's  brownie mix following instructions on box.  Pour into 12-inch spingform pan, pulling some batter up the sides of the pan. 

In a small bowl for microwave oven or in double-boiler, melt chocolate.  Beat in cream cheese until thoroughly mixed.  Mix in sugar until evenly distributed, then add eggs, whip until fluffy.  Pour onto the top of the brownie batter in the springform pan.

Place in middle of oven, bake for at least 90 minutes, until the cheesecake begins to firm up around the edges and is still slightly jiggly in the middle.     Turn off heat, allow cheesecake to cool inside the oven.

*This recipe leaves a slightly crispy, crackly crust on the top of the cheesecake, not unlike a standard brownie finish.  If you prefer a soft, traditional cheesecake finish, you will want to put a couple of pans of water in the oven, before you put the batter in to bake.