OMG cheesecake

As a side note, Luca and I made our first cheesecake yesterday afternoon. It was lemon flavored with a graham cracker crust (the one from the Bittman cookbook). And OMG, it was... no IS, A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.

So light and fluffy! I was worried about the step where I had to fold the beaten egg whites into the rest of the batter, that I would end up deflating the whites, but this didn't end up being a problem at all.

We decided not to go with the sour cream topping. We made that when we did a key lime pie recipe a few months back, and it was really good, but this time laziness prevailed. And the long and the short of it was: it wasn't necessary.

We'll definitely have to repeat this experiment. Who knew cheesecake would be so easy?




Recipe -- The brief version
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees (my oven runs cool, so we preheated to 340) -
1. Separate 4 eggs -- put the whites in one bowl and the yolks in another.
2. In the bowl with the yolks, use an electric mixer to make the yolks creamy.
3. Then to the yolks add 24 oz. plain Philadelphia cream cheese (3 bricks), the juice from 1 lemon, 1 cup of white sugar, and the zest of 1 lemon.
4. When the mixture is smooth, mix in 1 Tb of white flour.
5. Use the electric mixer to beat the egg whites to the point where they stand up in peaks by themselves.
6. Fold the egg whites gently into the egg yolk - cream cheese mixture.
7. Pour the contents into a pre-made graham cracker crust shell (you could always be fancy and make this yourself if you wanted to).
8. Pop in the oven for ~1 hr, until it starts to brown slightly.
9. Cool on counter top, and then after 30-60 minutes, cover with plastic wrap and pop in the fridge until it's fridge temperature (we let it sit overnight).
10. Eat for breakfast the next morning.