A weighty issue. To bake or not to bake?

On Saturday night I went to Sarah and Craig’s for dinner. Sarah was cooking a Moroccan feast and I offered to bring dessert. That’s just what I do these days.

Bloomin’ Easy Vanilla Cheesecake

On Saturday morning I made a quick trip to Woollies – all very normal and uneventful except for the fact that carrying around a kilo of cream cheese nearly cost me an arm. Yes, that’s right, Jamie’s cheesecake calls for almost a kilo of cream cheese. Shite. That’s a damn lot of cheese Oliver.

Anyway, back in the kitchen and I started by whizzing a packet of digestive biscuits in the food processor and adding the crumbs to melted butter to create the biscuit base. Pushed into a springform pan, this went into the oven for 10 minutes (except it was a little bit more like 15 minutes, coz I got distracted chatting to Evans who’d popped in for a quick visit, so it may have been a little darker on the bottom than planned…).

Then for the filling, I added the great lump of cream cheese to caster sugar and corn flour and tried to mix it with my (usually pretty handy) egg beaters. My god – they nearly had a heart attack. I think the beaters felt the same way about whipping 900 grams of cream cheese as I felt about eating. Tired and on the edge of a burn out. So, after cleaning up a few stray blobs of cream cheese from the floor and carefully removing the beaters (checking for bent metal – not kidding!), I added two eggs, some thickened cream, the seeds from a vanilla pod and the zest of an orange and a lemon and beat it together well (a slightly less daunting task for the beaters once I’d given it a bit of a mix first off with the wooden spoon, but still, they may not ever forgive me! Will they have the strength to whip egg whites to stiff peaks for my next pavlova outing? I can only wait and see…).

Pouring the cheesey mixture onto the biscuit base and giving it a bang to remove air bubbles, it went into the oven for 45 minutes.

After the amazing Moroccan feast that Sarah served up for dinner that night – lamb tagine with almonds & prunes, spicy Moroccan chicken and cous cous – we had a short break before I served up the cheesecake – with the cherries on top (I cheated and used tinned cherries, as trying to find fresh ones to then stew anyway, seemed like a task far beyond me after the effort with cream cheese).

The reaction from everyone else was very positive and I don’t think they were just being nice, but if I am going to be completely honest – and what have I got hide? – I thought it was pretty disgusting. Yep, in 36 weeks of cooking with Jamie, I can quite honestly say that this is the recipe that I have enjoyed the least. To be completely fair, I don’t love baked cheesecake (I love the kind of cream cheese cheesecake that sets in the fridge), but I thought that was because I don’t really love ricotta and as this one didn’t have ricotta in it, I thought I’d be pleasantly surprised. Quite the opposite.

But at least it means that I can now answer the oft asked question – “what’s the dish you’ve enjoyed the least during your experiment?” The bloomin’ cheesecake.

Xx