like most things i cook, particularly when i bake, once i get an idea of what i want to make, a taste for something, i have a very specific idea of what it is that i want, even if it’s something i’ve never made or even eaten before. then comes the challenge of finding a recipe that matches the idea i’ve created in my head. i usually end up mining a dozen recipes and making a hybrid of my own creation. (sometimes with disastrous results, as baked goods in particular are delicate science experiments that don’t always appreciate being frankensteined together). nevertheless, i am a incorrigibly kitchen tinkerer. except possibly with bread, where i am utterly humbled, i don’t have the patience to make a recipe correctly the first time. who has time to always follow the rules? today’s cheesecake is no exception, except that the results were fabulous, not disastrous. beginners luck?

adapted from Smitten Kitchen (who adapted from Gourmet Magazine), from QueenB on Chowhound and the blueberry sauce from Memories in the Baking.

Crumb crust:
10 ounces finely ground graham crackers
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar (cut back sugar by 1/4 c if the graham cracker is a sugar-topped variety)
1/2 teaspoon salt

(Not quite so) Very tall cheesecake filling:
3 eight-ounce packages cream cheese, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 lemons’ woth of finely grated zest (Meyer if you can get ’em)
1 tsp finely grated orange zest (omit if you find the Meyers)
1/4 cup fresh (Meyer) lemon juice
3 large eggs, room temperature
1 large egg yolk, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix crust ingredients. (The food processor is great for mashing it all up together in a couple of quick pulses, but you can do it by hand as well — put the graham crackers into a ziplock back and smoosh it with a rolling pin or wine bottle). Press the crust into bottom and up the sides of a 9-inch springform pan, stopping one inch below of the top rim (very important! see below). After pressing the crust into place, put into the freezer until you’re ready to pour the filling in. Don’t pre-bake! I did that with my first attempt at crust and it got a burned taste and the crust slipped down the sides of the pan into a glop at the bottom and I had to throw it out and start again.

Preheat oven to 550 degrees (or however hot your oven will go, taking into account the fact that some pans (teflon, or other cheap surfaces) have a maximum heat limit of around 475 (or so I’ve heard…)).

With electric mixer or stand mixer (sigh…someday a Kitchenaid will be mine), beat together cream cheese, sugar, flour, zest(s) and lemon juice with an electric mixer until smooth. Add vanilla, then eggs and yolk, one at a time, scraping bowl as you go.

Put springform pan with crust into a shallow baking pan (to catch all the butter which WILL run out of the springform pan and smoke up your kitchen if allowed to fall into the bottom of the oven). Pour filling into crust. Ideally, you want the filling to come just above the level of the crust. If any crust peeks up above the filling, it will burn black in the first 12 minutes of high temperature baking (see next paragraph), and later you’ll have to go back through with a spoon and carefully scrape off the burned bits. I know this for fact.

Put into the middle of a 550 degree oven for 12 minutes or until the surface is puffed and starts to brown. Reduce the temperature to 200 degrees and continue baking until cake is mostly firm, about 45 minutes more. The center should still be slightly wobbly.

Because I hate it when recipes don’t explain the Why (and I often ignore very good instructions as a result), I will tell you: the point of the hot oven is to keep the cheesecake from cracking when it cools without having to monkey around with a water bath. The other benefit of the very hot oven is that sugar caramelizes at temperatures above 320. So getting the crust good and hot in the initial 12 minutes gives the crust a lovely caramel flavor and texture — more interesting than just sweet graham crackers and butter.

Topping No. 1: Sour Cream
2 cups sour cream
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

While the cake is baking, mix together sour cream and remaining sugar and vanilla. Remove the cake from the oven, gently spread sour cream mixture over top, and return to oven and bake 10 more minutes.

Turn oven off and cool cheesecake in oven with door propped open for 1 hour. Remove cheesecake from oven, run a knife around the outside edge of the cake to loosen it, and then cool completely on wire rack. Move to the refrigerator and cool at least 6 hours.

(stay with me here, i promise you that both toppings are worth it)

Topping No. 2: Blueberry Sauce
1 pint fresh blueberries
¼ cup sugar (adjust according to sweetness of berries and desired tartness of sauce)
3 tablespoons water, separated
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp cornstarch

In a medium saucepan combine berries, sugar, 2 TBS water, and lemon juice. In a small dish, mix the cornstarch with remaining 1 TBS of cold water and stir until the mixture is completely smooth. Once the sauce begins to bubble lightly, spoon small amounts of the hot blueberry liquid into the cornstarch mixture, stirring after each addition, until you’ve raised the temperature of the cornstarch mixture to match that of the bubbling pan. (The Why? glad you asked. Cornstarch, if added directly to hot liquid, will clump. But whisk it smoothly into a small amount of cold liquid, then gradually raise the temperature of the liquid and you’ll never have the clumping issue. This is one of the most basic cooking techniques I learned from my mother. Thanks mom!). Pour the cornstarch mixture into the pan with the berries and stir. It should begin to thicken in a minute or two. Cook until the blueberries begin to break down and the sauce is slightly thickened, about 10 minutes. Cool to room temperature.

When you’re ready to serve the cheesecake, pour the berry mixture into the center of the cake and gently spread outwards toward the sides. Garnish slices of cheesecake with thinly cut lemon wheels and serve and watch your family/friends devour it.

The internet tells me that cheesecake keeps up to two weeks in the fridge, but I scoff at that. Who would ignore cheesecake in their fridge for two weeks? Ours kept nicely for 2 days.

parenthetical count: 23.

baking triumph! this weekend i made strawberry shortcake to share at my CSA’s potluck meal (post to come). the strawberries were a dream; picked right out of the field, served still sun-warm. there was no need to sugar them in the least. we just sliced, mashed, and poured on top of the shortcakes i had made earlier in the day. we topped with whipped cream (from a can, shameful i know, but we were camping-cooking, which is the one time that one is allowed to cut such corners), and it was an instant success. our only mistake was in not making a triple batch. but honestly, cardboard topped with those strawberries would have been delicious. as i ate my portion, i started to realize that the shortcake was totally inferior. even soaked in mashed strawberries, my plastic spoon barely could cut through the dense, dry, tough-bottomed cake. what went wrong?

making biscuits was one of the first things i learned to cook. i could make them by the time i was 12. mix milk and bisquick (ah bisquick, a baking secret weapon i have worked long and hard to liberate myself from) into a sticky dough. flour a dish towel, drop the dough onto it, roll out into 3/4″ thickness, and use a drinking glass to cut rounds. re-roll the scraps to eliminate waste. plop onto a cookie sheet and put into a hot oven for 10 minutes. done! top with honey and butter and serve with soup on a cold night.

i have long since banned the hydrogenated-oil laden bisquick from my kitchen, so to make this week’s shortcakes, i cracked open the Joy of Cooking, my basic go-to reference, to the section on biscuits. (since shortcake is really just a sweetened biscuit). besides using flour and shortening, the recipe was pretty much the same as what we used to make when i was a kid. they looked the same: 2″ rounds and about 3/4″ thick. that’s 3/4″ thick before and after they baked. they came out with a sweet, bread-y flavor but dry and dense and low. and now that i think about it, the bisquick ones of my childhood were similarly dense, and dry if you didn’t cover them up with more butter when it was time to eat them. aren’t i missing something if i have to coat my baked good in more butter to make it moist enough to eat? these weren’t cutting it. when i picture strawberry shortcake in my mind, i think of a thick, fluffy soft white flour biscuit, getting soggy with strawberries as you eat it. nothing that needs a knife to cut it, for goodness sake.

so when we got back from the farm today i sat down with my copy of The Science of Good Food to learn just what makes biscuits flaky and light. baking is a complicated science, and i won’t attempt to recount much of it here other than: reactions between acids and bases are part of what causes the leavening action. which is why the addition of acidic ingredients (like buttermilk), and why the use of both baking powder (base and acid both) AND baking soda (just a base).

after this basic background i dove into the internets to see what they had to teach me. this was a helpful guide, much of it i already knew (keep your fats cold, don’t overwork the dough), but other things, like the ratio of fat-to-flour was a new one. and i’ve been learning about different kinds of flour lately (cake, pastry, all-purpose, bread, plus the whole wheat versions of all of those). umm, there are six kinds of (wheat-based) flour in my baking cupboard right now. (yes, i have a baking cupboard). it seemed like the Joy of Cooking recipe was short on fat, and that the rolling method just worked the dough way too much, which creates gluten and toughens up the dough. and the additional acid in buttermilk helps limit gluten formation as well as substituting in some lower protein (cake or pastry) flours.

so i headed out to the grocery for half and half, buttermilk, and just to be sure, replaced my baking soda and powder, since i’m not sure how old they are and they lose their reactivity after a while. making this many changes, of course, destroys the scientific method, but really, how many batches of mediocre biscuits did i really want to make?

then, because i can’t leave well enough alone, i started adapting. this recipe is based on this biscuit recipe, but i opted for lower fat buttermilk and switched the cream out for half-and-half with no ill effects, and i increased the sugar to get a sweeter dough. also, i like it when you have to tear the biscuits apart, so i nestled them all together.

* 1-1/4 cups all purpose flour
* 1/2 cup pastry flour
* 1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
* 1/2 tsp. baking soda
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 2 tsp. sugar
* 1/3 cup cold butter, cut into small pieces
* 2/3 cup cold low-fat buttermilk
* 1/2 cup cold half and half
* 1 cup all purpose flour for shaping biscuits
* 2 Tbsp. melted butter or milk

1) mix dry ingredients
2) cut the butter into chunks, keeping it very cold
3) use a pastry cutter or food processor to cut the butter in, leaving some visible chunks about 1/2 the size of a marble.
4) make a well in the center of the dough, and pour in the milks
5) stir gently only until just combined.
6) let dough sit for five minutes
7) pour the 1 cup flour into a plate or wide-mouthed bowl
8) flour your hands and scoop the dough out in scant 1/4 cup balls. it will be very sticky.
9) drop each ball into the flour dish, coat lightly, then gently shape into a ball. work the dough as little as possible!
10) place the dough balls in a greased baking dish, nestling them up against one another
11) brush the tops with milk or melted butter
12) bake at 450 for 15-18 minutes, till nicely browned
13) allow to cook 3-5 min in the baking dish, then transfer to a wire rack

the results? success! these were light, fluffy, stood up tall, and began to soak up berry juice in a delicious way when covered with mashed strawberries. definitely didn’t need additional butter.

some ideas — you could cut the sugar back if you wanted to make a savory biscuit rather than a shortcake. or, sticking with the sweet approach, Teresa suggested adding some turbino sugar to the top that would caramelize and crunch, which i bet would be awesome. next time i’m going to attempt it with wheat pastry flour and see where that gets us.

even without our own garden we find ourselves with a embarrassment of zucchini this time of year; we recently joined a CSA, and one week’s vegetable box yielded enough squash for a a tomato-zucchini-dill side-dish, two pasta dishes, and this weekend i retreated to the obligatory zucchini bread. this is not a chore, however — i’m always looking for an excuse to bake. two over-ripe bananas? banana bread coming up. even better if i can procrastinate something, anything, in order to bake. saturday afternoon was set aside for finishing up the blog transition; consequently, i decided i should bake and here it is 6pm and i’m finally sitting down at my desk, with a warm loaf of Procrastination Bread cooling on the kitchen counter.

so i trolled a half dozen recipes (paula deen suggest serving hers with a side of whipped cream, naturally) before deciding that i’d made up my own version. admittedly, doing something my own way without having done it correctly the first time IS how i have gone astray in the kitchen many many times. but i know my way around quickbreads pretty well.

i loosely based this on 101 cookbook’s Special Zucchini Bread Recipe, borrowing the structure more than the flavors. 101 cookbooks is great about using wheat flours. simply substituting wheat for white flour in a recipe usually yields baked goods that are crumbly and dry. the recipe needs to be built for wheat flour, and that’s beyond my baking skills as of yet. anyway, i had chocolate on the brain, but i couldn’t really justify making a cocoa-powder-laden loaf (tho, yum) and still consider it something that’s on the diet-approved list. but maybe sneaking a few chocolate chips wouldn’t count, right? its like putting chocolate into mixed nuts and calling it trail mix. in another arrangement, the same ingredients would be a snickers bar. but packaging is everything.

so, i packaged chocolate chips into a bread loaded with zucchini. or, hid zucchini in a chocolate chip muffin, thereby tricking Ben into eating one more zucchini dish this week. one of the loaf pans seems to have gone missing, so it was necessary at the last minute to bail into one loaf pan and one muffin pan, but no harm done there.

here’s the recipe, with a few tweaks added in for next time based on how these came out:

Procrastination Bread, or Chocolate Chip Orange Zucchini Bread/Muffins

1.5 cup chopped walnuts. i like pretty big chunks, so i tend to buy halves and then chop them slightly
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks (i recommend guittard for chips, or better yet, buy a scharffenberger bar and chop it into chunks)
zest of 2 oranges

3 cup whole wheat pastry flour (hard to find, totally worth it. you can order it here, or, happily, Berkeley Bowl carries it in the bulk foods section)
1.5 tsp baking soda (make sure your box isn’t more than a year old — it DOES matter)
.5 tsp baking powder (ditto that for age of baking soda)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg (could try allspice in place of the nutmeg with interesting results)

.5 cup butter, softened
.75 cup granulated sugar
.5 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

3 cup grated zucchini (the food processor is your best friend here!)

1) toss together walnuts, orange zest and chocolate. set aside and try not to snack on too much. (think of it as a snickers bar, not trail mix).

2) mix together flour, baking soda and powder, salt and spices and set aside.

3) grate zucchini

4) cream butter with an electric mixer (or your big strong arm) till it’s fluffy. add sugar. then add eggs one at a time, and finally the vanilla. with a spatula, fold in the zucchini shreds.

5) mix in the flour mixture in several batches. don’t over mix. stir till the flour is almost but not quite incorporated. then add the chocolate/nut/orange mix and fold over a couple of times.

6) line 2 loaf pans with parchment paper (for real – once you discover parchment paper you’ll never butter/flour or pam a pan again). pour batter in and smooth the top.

7) baking 45 + minutes at 350 degrees, checking every 5 until the center is set. per 101 cookbook’s recommendation, don’t overbake, since the loaf will keep cooking for a few minutes once you pull it out. i made one loaf and a dozen cupcakes out of this recipe, since i could only find one of my loaf pans. the cupcakes took about 18 minutes. start checking them every 3 min after about 12 minutes.

8) let stand in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack or a dishtowel to fully cool.

9) now go back to doing whatever you were supposed to be doing before you started baking instead.