Monday, July 7, 2008

Vanilla Bean Cheesecake

Isn't it funny how sometimes the simplest recipes are really the best? No unnecessary ingredients, no weird techniques, just basic flavors that compliment one another and make sense together. I love that. This is what happened with the perfect cheesecake recipe that was shared with me a couple weeks ago. I finally had a good opportunity to make it- Erin and Reed joined us for the holiday weekend. This is going to be my favorite cheesecake recipe going forward, I just know it. I think it will be easily changed, if you get the craving for a flavored cheesecake. However, the original was definitely the best this weekend.





Here are the graham crackers in my tiny food processor... I had to do them in batches, but it worked!


Once finely ground, you add some cinnamon and sugar to the crackers.
Then you mix in some melted butter until you have a crumbly mixture. This goes in the bottom of the pie plate. I packed it down quite firmly. Bake for about 8-10 minutes.Next for the filling. Here are those vanilla beans I mentioned- they were great. Slice down the middle and scrape out the vanilla. You can get quite a bit out of them so go back a few times with your sharp knife. Also try the dull edge to see if there is any left in there. Once you have scraped everything you can out of the bean, don't throw away that pod!! Fill a small canister with sugar and leave it in there- voila, vanilla sugar! I used it later in the weekend in a recipe and omitted the vanilla and you never would have known!
Another kitchen relic- I brought out the hand mixer. Worked like a charm as well! This layer has cream cheese, eggs, sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and lemon zest.
Finally I topped the cake off with a cream layer, which was tangy and sweet. It was so good that I don't have any pictures of it after this! It is best made a day ahead so that it can fully chill. It was a little hard getting the first few pieces out of the pan, I would recommend letting it come to room temperature a bit first. A springform pan would probably be preferable, but once the first quarter of the cake was out of the pan, the rest went perfectly.After our cheesecake on Friday night, we bundled up and headed down to La Jolla to watch the fireworks. They were perfect, as always. We watched from the beach where Chris and I got married. It was fun to have visitors for the first time for the fourth of July, we really enjoyed our weekend. Hope you had a wonderful holiday as well!



Blurry!!! Oh well...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey! I didn't know Erie was visiting you! Lucky ducks! I bet you had a blast. :) Miss you kids!
xooxxo
meggie