"Beware the Ides of Cheesecake," or, Creamy Dreamy Cheesecake

In the second monthly installment of The Cheesecake Series, today we have a plain cheesecake dated Christmas 1978, with a note at the top that reads “hope you enjoy it!” It's written on sparkly Christmas stationery and signed “From Marge,” so I am assuming it came folded inside a holiday card. I love that idea-- long distance friends sending each other recipes when they can't visit each other in person. So old-school and cute.

Also, as an avid Golden Girls fan, I love that Eleanor and her friends were trading recipes for cheesecake long before the Golden Girls made cheesecake the dessert for women of a certain age to eat with their friends. (I especially love this because for a long time as a child I believed that the character of Dorothy Zbornak on the show was based on Eleanor, and that Sophia Petrillo was based on my Aunt Margie.)

I don't know how Eleanor felt about this particular cheesecake-- the recipe itself is in remarkably good condition, so it might not be one she made very often. I'm starting to feel like if you can find a cheesecake recipe that works for you, it's probably a better idea to stick with it than keep experimenting, but neither of the recipes I've tried so far have been particularly stellar, so I'm gonna keep trying. This cheesecake was definitely easier than the last-- no fancy ingredients (I'm looking at you, ricotta), and no weird steps like whipping egg whites into a meringue before folding them in gently. The crust, of course, was supposed to be made with graham crackers, but since I have no access to those and didn't want to make my own, I used digestive biscuits. This made the crust a little lighter in colour and a little thinner than I expected, but it was still delicious.

However. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but both times I've made cheesecakes from the box, they've risen like crazy while in the oven, then fallen, slumped, and browned on the top. This one was still good-- Judson took half of it to work and his colleagues gave it a resounding thumbs up, so I know it's not just me who thinks it was good. It's denser than the last one, but manages not to be overpoweringly heavy. It's incredibly creamy and has a really faint lemon flavour that's offsets all that creaminess really well. If I could find pie filling in this country, I'd serve it with cherries on top, but alas. Maybe next month.

The Verdict:

3 spoons out of five. It's good, it really is. But if yours looks like mine, you probably wouldn't want to serve it to the Queen of England when she drops by for afternoon tea. (Also note: pictured here I served it with Nutella, but if you're interested in authenticity, you'd better have it plain)

The recipe:

Creamy Dreamy Cheesecake

The Ingredients:

16 oz cottage cheese
16 oz cream cheese
16 oz sour cream
4 oz butter (1 stick, if you're stateside), plus extra for greasing the pan
4 eggs
1 ½ c sugar
3 tbsp flour
3 tbsp cornstarch
½ tsp lemon juice
2 tsp vanilla
1/3 c graham cracker or digestive biscuit crumbs

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 325F/162C.
Blend all ingredients except crumbs “until smooth like sour cream.”
(If yours is like mine, you might still see some tiny lumps from the cottage cheese, but as long as there are only a few, you're good.)
Heavily grease the bottom and sides of a springform pan, then sprinkle the crumbs in and shake to distribute evenly.
Pour the cheese mixture smoothly and quickly on top of the loose crumbs to avoid shifting the crumbs around too much.
Bake for one hour, then turn off oven and without opening the door, leave the cheesecake in for additional two hours.
Place cheesecake on counter (not refrigerator) to cool completely (this will take several hours), then refrigerate until serving, up to overnight if needed.

French Pudding, with apologies to the French

Eleanor was superstitious. More superstitious than any person I've ever known, and it wasn't an ironic superstitiousness, either: she was totally sincere. AND I don't mean, like, “broken mirror” superstitions, but weird ones like “if you put your shirt on backwards you have to leave it that way because it's bad luck to turn it around,” and “don't turn the page of your calendar to the new month until the new month has already started.”

So, in honour of Friday the 13th, which would have been Eleanor's least favourite day of this year, I give you my first disaster recipe from the box. It is not a recipe for pudding. Nor is there anything about this recipe that is French, with the possible exception of the inclusion of unsweetened whipped cream, but I think even that's a bit of a stretch. This is sort of like a trifle, but you're supposed to make it in a baking pan, and it includes raw eggs... I guess if I get food poisoning, we'll know today is truly an unlucky day. And for a no-bake recipe, get ready to use all of your dishes again.

I made a couple of substitutions here: I can't get Nilla Wafers anywhere, so I used Digestive Biscuits. Also, I can't find crushed pineapple in this country and I don't know what size “a small can” is, so I used two tiny cans of pineapple rings, which I pulverised way beyond “crushed” in my food processor. 

Anyway, it's way less bad than I thought it would be, but I still think it probably counts as a disaster. Eleanor may have liked it (there's a note in her handwriting that reads “delicious” in the top corner), but I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. In the 1960s it might have been awesome, but today it's kind of just a mess that reminds me of something that would have been served at a church potluck when I was a kid.

The verdict:

1 spoon out of five. I think it still deserves a single spoon because the recipe clearly worked the way that it was supposed to, it's just that the flavour combination and texture and its general existence are not really appetising. I do, however, feel like this is a fixable recipe: what if the cookie layers were cubed angel food cake? Or there was a layer of white cake, then pineapple filling, then a white cake layer and then the custard/whipped cream combo was the frosting? It's probably possible to fix this up into something edible, but if you make it as listed here, it's probably not going to be great. Unless you just really like canned pineapple, I guess.

The recipe:

French Pudding

The ingredients:

8 oz Nilla Wafers or digestive biscuits, crushed
4 oz butter
1 ¾ c powdered sugar
2 eggs
1 c whipping cream
1 small can crushed pineapple, or 2 small cans pineapple rings, crushed in a blender or food processor
½ c chopped nuts (I used pecans)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Sprinkle half of the cookie crumbs into the bottom of a 9x13 pan, as evenly as possible.
Cream butter, powdered sugar, and eggs until well-mixed, then pour it into the pan on top of the crumbs.
Whip the cream until fluffy, then spoon it evenly over the butter mixture in the pan.
Spoon the crushed pineapple over the whipped cream evenly.
Sprinkle the chopped nuts and the remaining cookie crumbs over the pineapple and press down gently.
Refrigerate until ready to eat, so, basically refrigerate forever.

Yields a 9x13 pan of pudding, and if you could find 35 people who wanted to eat it, I bet it would comfortably feed all of them. 

Dressed-up Tomato Soup

Sometimes I wish I was more like Eleanor and her friends, women who, by all accounts, gave no care as to what anyone else thought.

Pictured: Eleanor (Far left) and Friends , drinking wine and Giving no shits.

Eleanor's best friend, my Aunt Margie, once made a lasagna for a dinner party. It's worth noting here that there was nothing Eleanor feared more than making a lasagna. She talked so much about how difficult it is that my mom STILL has never tried to make one out of fear she'd do it wrong. Anyway, Margie's friends had gathered around the table, everyone was anxiously awaiting the lasagna, and as she pulled it out of the oven, bubbly and steaming...

She flipped over the serving dish and the entire thing landed face-down on the kitchen floor. What did she do, you ask? She scraped it up and served it anyway, with the rationale that what her guests didn't know wouldn't kill 'em.*

Anyway, none of her friends died or got food poisoning, so clearly she was right. But the point is this: Eleanor and Margie didn't care what people thought. They did what they wanted, and maybe part of that is the luxury of age, but I think a lot of it was just their personalities. I, however, did not inherit this trait. 

Pictured: Eleanor (Far Left) and friends at the beach. Not Pictured: Any shits. On an unrelated note, I would give anything to own that bathing suit top.

Note: This is not a recipe for tomato soup. It is, instead, a recipe for how to dress up pre-existing tomato soup. So to start with, procure yourself some soup.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for this meal, which is basically just slightly fancy tomato soup. I was going to make the soup from scratch, but as you will soon see, that was not in the cards. We were out of fabric softener, so I headed to that aisle first and put the cheapest bottle in my basket. It happened to also be the biggest bottle, at nearly a gallon. I continued my shopping in peace until suddenly I heard what can only be described as a gushing sound coming from the vicinity of my elbow. Alarmed, I looked down to see that the fabric softener had tipped over, the lid had come off, and the bottle was gushing all over the tile floor of Tesco.

Now, in case you don't use fabric softener because you have a dryer and don't need the extra softening power, let me tell you something about it: it pretty much has the texture of liquid soap. So, after nearly wiping out in the mess I had just made, I had to go find a Tesco employee to come clean up the mess before someone died. But it happened to be the morning, so Tesco was full of nothing but running children and older people with canes. (Thankfully, Britain is less litigious than the States). Anyway, I made a giant mess, all of my groceries were so covered in goo that I couldn't even purchase any of them, and I was so embarrassed I ended up just grabbing a bottle of rum (for a recipe, I swear!) and a can of tomato soup and getting the heck out of there.

But now I have to find a new grocery store since I can never show my face there ever again, and I didn't want to brave another grocery that same day since my cheeks were still red, so I used canned tomato soup for this recipe and just dressed it up from there. It was still delicious, so no complaints here, but if you have the time, try making this recipe with homemade tomato soup. My favourite (and the one I was going to use) is here. Just leave out the cheese and tortellini and replace it with the ingredients listed here.

*Another reason I wish I was more like Eleanor and her friends is that I wish my kitchen floor was always... sometimes... even occasionally clean enough that I would eat from it, never mind my poor friends.

Send me your good wishes on finding another grocery store with such a great selection of marshmallows and weird 1950s-style ingredients, friends. I'm so humiliated that I don't think I can ever leave my flat again.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of 5, just because it's so easy it really shouldn't count as a recipe to begin with. As stated, I made this recipe with a can of Heinz tomato soup and dressed it up from there. I couldn't find the brand-name noodles the recipe calls for to put on it, so we had it with prawn crackers (which I got from the Asian grocery since I couldn't bear to go back to Tesco). If you have those wonton-type noodles that come with Chinese takeout on hand, I think those would be excellent, but no one is going to tell if you just use Saltines. Made with a can of soup it's literally the easiest thing ever. Made from scratch takes a bit longer, but homemade tomato soup is so good I think it's probably worth it.

The Recipe:

Saucy Tomato Soup

The Ingredients:

Tomato Soup-- from a can or your favourite recipe
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp pepper, black or red
Prawn crackers or fried wontons

THE DIRECTIONS:

Heat tomato soup thoroughly.
Stir in soy sauce, lemon juice, and pepper.
Ladle generously into bowls and top with prawn crackers or fried wontons.