We've all got one; a group of friends who get together and talk about food, share recipes and techniques and generally shoot the shit. Ours just happens to be foul-mouthed and unabashed. This blog is a collaboration of authors (even occasionally male!) who share a love of booze, profanity, food and bitching.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Bow before me, puny humans!

Or, as my sister would put it, “Gawd Cwaffee Cheesecake” (picture Mike Myer’s Jewish mother voice from SNL in the nineties). No, I dunno why she started saying it like that.

Anyway, God Coffee is an invention of our friend Jes who would mix various liqueurs into her coffee during parties, traditionally Irish cream, Kahlua, and Amaretto, but it could include any combination of these things (plus some more exotic concoctions; we picked up a bottle of Dooley’s toffee flavored liqueur, and it was a welcome addition). Lovely stuff, and for my friend Thomas’ birthday (since he didn’t give me a definite item to make) I decided to delve into making a cheesecake version.

My first step was to find a coffee crust or base. I have a cookie I make sometimes that’s a Kahlua chocolate chip cookie which is packed with coffee flavor, but I then considered the idea of a coffee shortbread base. Shortbread after all, looks like crust to me. So I went browsing, and came up with one recipe that looked likely enough, though I halved this beast. Instead of dropping them, I smushed the dough into the bottom of a greased springform pan (yes, I know it’s coated and nonstick, but I’m a cautious girl), and baked it for about ten minutes.

Incidentally, the dough was a bit moist for this, so it could probably stand some more flour. I took the advice of one of the commenters and dissolved the instant coffee in a small amount (1.5 t to be exact) of hot water to avoid coffee grains in the dough, and it worked like a charm.

All during this, I was paranoid. Would it come out? Would it taste gross? Would it overbake once I filled it with the cheesecake? This is why I have absolutely no pictures of the first part of this recipe. Sorry.

While that cooled, I set about engineering the cheesecake filling. I was an idiot and only picked up 2 packages of cream cheese at the store and a small container of sour cream. Turns out all the recipes I have that I could use as a base require 3 blocks of cream cheese. I used to have a recipe that was no-bake and required only two blocks of cream cheese and some instant pudding, but gremlins appear to have made off with it, so to the Internet.

I figured Jello might have my long-lost recipe, so I searched their site and came up with this recipe, thank god. I added 2T of Irish cream to the batter, but otherwise followed this.

Oh! And I have a new toy that I hadn’t tried out yet, the Beater Blade. It’s supposed to scrape the sides of your bowl and blend your doughs and batters more effectively. It worked pretty well, better than the regular beater attachment, but there was still unmixed cream cheese on the sides of the bowl. Luckily I got it on sale, so I don’t feel too badly about it.

Well about this time I realized, duh, I could write this recipe up. So I finally have pictures from this point on.



Coming out of the oven. Covering the pan with foil to prevent premature browning as the recipe said, and the damned foil stuck to the top. So for once I had a baked cheesecake without cracks, and the bloody thing is stuck to the foil instead! Oh well, cracks or an ugly top regardless, that’s what the sour cream mix is for.



Putting on the topping. Yeah, I dunno how the people who dress these things for the promo pictures do it; mine always look a bit rough, globby in spots no matter how much I smooth it with a silicone spatula. It’s sour cream going on a hot cheesecake, it’s gonna be melty.



And the finished product. She ain’t pretty, but if she tastes anywhere near as good as the batter did (don’t judge me! I got some on my finger!), I’ll be set.

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