Cheesecake sauce flight....

So the sauces have been made and the table was set...

Brown Butter Bourbon Sauce
For printable recipe, please click here

2 C  Heavy Cream

½  stick of salted butter, cut into 4ths

½ to ¾ C  Dark Brown Sugar

2 tsp Bourbon

½  tsp kosher salt

In a medium sauce pan whisk all ingredients together.   Bring to a boil, continuing to whisk occasionally.  Reduce heat, continue to cook for 15 more minutes.  Turn off heat, let set for 10 minutes before serving.   Serve warm.  Refrigerate leftovers. 

Blackberry Reduction
For printable recipe, please click here

2 - 3 C Blackberries (fresh or frozen)

½  stick of salted butter, cut into 4ths

½ to 1 C Sugar

½ to 1 tsp  Balsamic Vinegar

In a medium sauce pan, on medium heat, add blackberries and butter.  The butter will completely melt and the blackberries will start to become very juicy.  Let simmer for about 5 min. after butter has melted.  Stir in desired amount of sugar.  Sugar should melt pretty quickly and the berry juice should start to thicken up.  Splash with desired amount of balsamic vinegar.   Pour berries into a strainer over a bowl in order to sift out seeds.  Serve warm or cold. Refrigerate leftovers. 

Chocolate Orange Ganache
For printable recipe, please click here

2+ C  Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips

1 to 1½ C  Heavy Cream

1 Tbs  Salted Butter

2 - 4 Tbs  Sugar

½  to 1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Orange Zest
Pinch of Kosher Salt

In a medium sauce pan, over medium high heat, whisk together: cream, butter and sugar.  Let this come to a boil, whisking occasionally (DO NOT LET IT BURN ON THE BOTTOM).   Take it off the heat and whisk in the chocolate chips; whisk until they are completely melted.  Put it back on the burner, low heat, whisk in vanilla, salt and orange zest.  Serve warm.  Refrigerate leftovers.   

 All went well with making the sauces.  They went much faster than the cheesecake baking the night before (25 min per pan x 8 pans is a lot of baking time).  I was done with all 3 sauces with kitchen clean up in less than 2 hours.  I put the sauces in plastic squeeze bottles for easier transport/serving (you can microwave in the bottles as long as you don't over do the time...20 sec per bottle w/ stirring in between the 20 sec. intervals).

They were tasty and a perfect complement to the cheesecake.  I hope everyone enjoyed the sauce flight at work.

Enjoy the foods of your labor.  :-)   

 

So tired...so tired...

I stayed up til 3am this morning making cheesecake.  Not the best laid plan I have to admit.  I would have taken pictures of the finished product in their pretty Tiffany blue boxes, but I was so tired that my fingers did not function with enough dexterity to accomplish this task (the fact that I used dexterity in a sentence right now is impressing me, since my brain stopped functioning properly an hour ago...I need a nap).  

Anywho, its on to making the sauces tonight for tomorrows birthday function at work.  I will post pictures of everything tomorrow and let you know how the sauces turn out.

Enjoy the foods of your labor.  :-)

The "Mini Me" of Cheesecake...

The office birthday party for the month of January is coming up soon.  I am in charge of arranging it by myself, since my birthday is the only one in December (thanks mom and dad...why is it that everyone I know has a December birthday, but the people I work with???).  I decided that the more difficult I make my life the better...so instead of bringing in a store bought cake of some sort, big enough to feed an army, I would make cheesecake for the 40+ people that work here (I think its around 40 give or take...I can't seem to count beyond 10 with my shoes on).  It also occurred to me that making a cheesecake in the normal spring form pan would never do for a few simple reasons...

1.  I am pretty sure you can only get 5 servings out of a cheesecake this way.

   

2.  By the time the third person has tried to get their slice, the thing would look so mangled that nobody would want to eat it.  

So I got the idea that using muffin tins and cupcake papers would be the way to go to make little individual servings of cheesecake.  Then I started to stress...how the heck do I take a full cheesecake recipe and bake it in little mini portions???  Will it stick to the paper???  How am I suppose to get all of these too work in a nice manner???  AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!

I took a breath and "GOOGLED" it; someone, some where, must have baked these at some point in time...right?  Google didn't let me down, I was lead to a blog, Rainy Days and Sundays, in which they had made mini cheesecakes similar to Giada's Individual Orange Chocolate Cheesecakes from Food Network.  This was a good start to figure out the cooking time with the recipe I was going to use.  I was starting to feel less stress, as long as the things didn't stick to the paper...feeling more stress again.  AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So at 9:00pm, last Monday,  it was time to make my tester cheesecakes (don't ask me why I started at 9pm, maybe I like stress and no sleep).  I started off by mixing up graham cracker crust for 1  9in  pie.  After placing all of the papers in my muffin tins, I pressed a respectable spoonful of crust into each paper and then pressed it down with my 2 Tbls All Clad measuring spoon (they are perfect for this since they are flat on the bottom).  I set the pans aside and started on the cheesecake.

Cheesecake 
For printable recipe, please click here

5 pkgs (8oz ea) Cream Cheese (room temp)

1 ¾    C  Sugar

3 Tbs  Flour

2 Tsp  Lemon Zest

1 ½ Tsp  Orange Zest

¼ Tsp  Vanilla Extract

5  Eggs  +  2  Egg Yolks (room temp)

¼ C  Heavy Cream (room temp)

Preheat oven 350 °.  In a large mixer bowl w/ the paddle attachment; blend cheese, sugar, flour, zests, vanilla at high speed.  At medium speed mix in eggs & yolks 1 at a time, mixing until smooth, occasionally scraping the bowl w/ a spatula.  Mix in cream.  Pour into prepped muffin pans, about 3/4 full.  Bake at 350° for 25 min. or until a toothpick test is clean.

***(For full cheesecake, using a spring form pan; preheat oven to 500°, pour the cheesecake mixture into prepped spring form and bake for 10 min.  Lower heat to 250°, bake for another hour.  Remove to cooling rack and let cool for 2 hours)

I let the little guys cool down in the pans for about 5 to 10 minutes before lifting them out.  Use two hands to pull out or else the paper will try to come away from the cheesecake.  The paper peeled away like magic and no part (cake or crust) stuck or tore apart.  This little idea created, in all, 48 lil cheesecake minis.  I did need to make extra crust in order to finish op the batter.  

Next blog, I will talk about my sauces I am planning for these little bits of heaven, a blackberry reduction, a brown butter bourbon sauce and a chocolate ganache (I have never ganached anything, I am very excited!!!). 

Enjoy the foods of your labor.  :-)