If you can accept (and even sympathize with) this, then enjoy.
Today, I woke up at 3 pm. I had driven back to my apartment from my parents' house late last night after finding out that my mom had filed for divorce. I can't say that this news came completely out of the blue, but it was something I had never expected to go through. I was dreading get up and sitting around thinking about this news all day, but thankfully my friend Sylvia called and invited me over to her apartment for a housewarming party. I offered to bring dessert since a) I always bring dessert anyway and b) it would give me a way to take my mind off of the news.
She was making an Italian dinner, so I immediately thought about making tiramisu. The problem with that, though, was that all of the recipes I found took about 4 hours. Since dinner was at 7:30 and I still had to go to the grocery, the laws of space and time were not on my side. I came across a recipe for tiramisu cheesecake and decided that was a pretty good substitute.
The recipe called for the crust to be made from crushed ladyfingers, but my grocery, amazingly, had none. At least none that I could find in any logical area. I made this with a sleeve of crushed graham crackers, 4 tablespoons of melted butter, and 2 tablespoons of strong instant coffee (since I'm about 6 months away from being able to buy coffee liquor).
My grocery also didn't have mascarpone, so I had to fake it with 8 oz cream cheese, 3 tablespoons sour cream, and 2 tablespoons heavy cream.
To that I added the 2 packages cream cheese (did I mention that I forgot that I needed an extra package because I was using one for my faux mascarpone? You'll see the result of this later...), a cup of vanilla sugar, 2 more tablespoons of strong instant coffee (I know it's horrible, but I don't drink coffee and therefore don't own a coffee maker), 2 eggs, and 4 tablespoons of flour.
It was a little lumpy. Is that bad? The recipe said to mix until just combined, so I let it go and poured it into a 9-inch springform pan.
I knew that I would have a short cheesecake, so I needed to make up 1/4 of the original height. I decided to use the rest of the heavy cream to make mocha whipped cream. This is all you need: 2 cups heavy cream, 3 tablespoons sugar (I actually used vanilla sugar, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from my nondescript canister), 1 tablespoon instant coffee, and 1 tablespoon hot water. Dissolve the instant coffee in the hot water and let it cool while you whip together the cream and sugar. Once the whipped cream is stiff, add the coffee and combine until you have a bowl full of heaven.
Seriously. I don't even like coffee and I couldn't stop eating spoonfuls of this stuff.
Oh my, doesn't that cheesecake look great? I can't imagine what could possibly be wrong with it...
Oh. Right. You may not be able to tell, but if this cheesecake was a professional athlete it would be a jockey. Now, I'm from Kentucky. I love jockeys. I've won a lot of money betting on good jockeys. I do not, however, like short cheesecakes.
To help compensate for its shortcomings, I piped the mocha whipped cream on top before I sprinkled on the semisweet chocolate shavings.
Did I mention that I was under a bit of a time crunch? This came out of the oven at just about 7:00, and I had to be at Sylvia's at 7:30. Cheesecake needs more than 10 minutes in the freezer to cool properly. By the time I got to Sylvia's, the whipped cream had melted into a sad, sloppy pool. It was able to solidify in the fridge while we ate, but all of it's height-obscuring illusions were lost.
Thankfully, though, it still tasted amazing. There were five of us at dinner and this was all that was left.
Note the poor chocolate shavings trying to escape the mocha flood.
Posts
Holy cow, this looks flippin' delicious.
ReplyDelete