Pod Is My Copilot
vPiMC: Episode 36 - Cooking With Taylor: Mom's Cheesecake
Join Taylor (with fine camera work by Babaloo) as he shares with the listening public the recipe for his mom's famous cheesecake. Plus, some other stuff. Be sure to check out episode 85, being uploaded the same time. Ho ho ho!
Here's the recipe:
CRUST:
8 tbsp butter
8 tbsp sugar
2 eggs
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs, four, baking powder. Mix together until ingredients form soft dough. Butter 8 x 12baking dish. Place flour on fingers (to keep dough from sticking), and spread dough into baking dish sides and bottom. (DO NOT roll - dough will be too soft.)
FILLING:
2 8 oz. pkgs of cream cheese
1 cup sugar
4 eggs, separated
4 tbsp flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups milk
pinch of salt (for egg whites)
Cream cream cheese, sugar, flour, vanilla and egg yolks together - mix well. SLOWLY add milk until cheese is dissolved. Add pinch of salt to egg whites. Beat until stiff. Fold egg whites into cream cheese filling; keep folding until lumps of egg whites dissolve. Pour into crust.
Place cinnamon on top of cheesecake. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until toothpick comes out of cheesecake clean.
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[music] Hey guys, this is Taylor from Potters My Gold Pilot. I wanted to wish you all a very happy holidays this year and I thought the best way for me to do that would be to share with you one of my favorite holiday traditions, which is my mom's cheesecake. This is a cheesecake that she's been making since I was a little kid. It comes from a church cookbook that she got when she first got married. It is not your typical cheesecake in that it is not a springform pan on cheesecake but rather it is a cheesecake where you create the crust, it's kind of out of a shortbread and you add all the ingredients in a 13x9 baking pan and there's an extra-seeking ingredients that we're going to talk about as we go along. So let's start with our first ingredients, which are butter and sugar. What we're going to do is we're going to take one stick of butter or eight tablespoons of butter and we're also going to take eight tablespoons of sugar or a half a cup of sugar and what we're going to do is we are going to cream those together and once we cream those together we're going to add some extra ingredients as well. So let's get started with that. We're going to take the butter. I like to cut up the butter first rather than just put an entire stick of butter. I think it melts to mix things along a little bit better. We're also going to take one half cup of sugar. Okay, our eggs and our sugar are creamed so we're going to add the next ingredients for the crust. Namely, we're going to take two cups of flour, which I've already pre-measured to help time go along a little bit faster. We're also going to take two eggs, that's Babaloo doing the camera work by the way. Say hello Babaloo. Hi, everybody. And we are also going to take one teaspoon of baking powder and what we're going to do is we're going to mix that all together until we form a soft dough. And then after that we're going to put the dough into our baking dish. You don't want to turn on the mixer too fast or you will have dust everywhere. Okay, as you can see, we have the consistency of some dough, dough, sort of made like a short bread dough. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to take our baking dish, which I've already put some butter on to keep it from sticking, and we're going to, by hand, take the dough and we're going to smash it into the sides of the baking pan, therefore making the crust. You want to go all the way up the sides of the baking pan. This is very, very important. You do not want to try and roll out the dough. Try and roll out the dough. It's just going to be too soft and you're going to have a mess on your hands. This is kind of where the love comes in. You're putting in, taking little tiny pellets of the dough and mashing it in. And the important thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that the dough comes all the way up the sides. This is part of the time-consuming part of the cheesecake, but it is definitely worth it. That was exhausting, but as you can see, we have the entire baking pan completely filled with the dough. Now, we're going to work on the actual cheesecake filling. While we're getting ready to fill our filling, honk, there's something that you all should notice. Those of you who watched my chicken bog video from a while ago, the clock? It's moving. It's a new clock, and this one actually works, so no need to comment about it on the blog. Thanks, though. Thanks for watching and being a big fan of pot is my co-pilot. We now take you back to your regularly scheduled cooking program. Okay, we have our crust ready. We have gotten all of our wet ingredients together. First thing you want to do before you make the wet ingredients is you want to preheat your oven. We're going to set it to bake at 350 degrees, and now let's get to the filling, which is the best part of the cheesecake. In order to make cheesecake, you have to have filling, and we have two packets, two eight ounce packets of cream cheese. Now, I am normally a Philadelphia cream cheese fan. You can use the other cream cheese, like your local supermarkets brand or another brand. I personally feel as though Philadelphia cream cheese is the best of them, and that's not just because I'm actually from Philadelphia, but whatever. So we want to put in our two packets of cream cheese, thump. Now, you also want to put in one cup of sugar. That's a little bit of egg from when we separated the eggs, which we're going to get to in a minute. So separate the eggs. You mean that's the cup of sugar? Yes. A cup of sugar. That's exactly what I mean. Thank you. Thank you for helping me. Sue Chef Babaloo. We also want to take the egg yolks, which this is for egg yolks, or three egg yolks in the inside of an egg yolk. We want to mix that into with the cream cheese, pour all that in there. We also want to take four tablespoons of flour. Okay, now, our next ingredient and a very important ingredient is vanilla. This vanilla is very special to me because Babaloo got it for me as one of the first gifts he ever got me, and I promised him I would bake him things. And this, I think, is the first thing that I've ever officially baked him, even though we've been together for months, but that's me and here and there. Clear. Yes. A moment, if I can talk with you for just a moment about vanilla, the better the vanilla, the better your cheesecake is going to be. And actually, that's pretty much the same with all baking goods. You want to get the highest quality of vanilla that you possibly can. I have used Publix brand vanilla, and I've also used this that you can get at William Sonoma. I can actually taste a difference. You might have all noticed there was a little editing glitch right there, but whatever. So if you can get and afford the better quality of vanilla, do yourself a favor and get that. Now what you want to do is you want to take a teaspoon of vanilla, which I can smell just the vanilla alone and that smells amazing. I'm not going to lie to you. The recipe calls for one tablespoon of vanilla. I put in two. It's a way that I took my mom's recipe and made it my own. Okay, so then what we're going to do is we're going to put the mixer on. You want to, again, you've got flour and stuff, so you want to try and mix it a little bit lower. You just pretty much get it all until it starts to mix. Now, luckily, we had the cream cheese a little bit of room temperature and you notice everything is mixing up. So now what you're going to do is you're going to take your next ingredient, which is, in fact, three cups of milk. You want to, and trust me on this one, slowly pour the milk into the bowl. If you don't, there's a good chance that you are going to be covered in white stuff. And I don't mean, like, Tappy usually is. Hey, Tappy. All right, let's slowly pour in the milk. And we want to do this until everything dissolves and so that it's all one big, you know, cheesecake filling. Now, I poured in all of my milk, and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to let this sit for a couple of minutes. I'm going to let it stir on its own, mainly because the cream cheese part has kind of formed its own little section and we want it to completely dissolve in the milk. So we're going to let it mix for a little bit, probably take a couple of minutes, depending on what kind of mixer that you have. And eventually when it's all done, then we're going to pour it into the pie crust. Okay, as you can see, our wet ingredients for the filling have mixed together and they are all ready to be poured in to the pie crust or so you would think. This here, not a sex toy. It is, in fact, a hand mixer and what we're going to do is we're going to take the egg whites that we had from before when we put in the egg yolks, we put in a pinch of salt into the egg whites and we're going to beat the egg whites until they're stiff. So I've tried this before, it's taken upwards of about 20 to 30 minutes if you do it by hand. It is a pain in the ass. So if you have a hand mixer or if you want to take all of this, transfer it to another bowl, put the egg whites in and use the mixer that's ready to be using, that's okay if you can avoid doing it by hand. I'm lazy like that, so try this, okay? And here we go. The pie. Okay, that actually the vibrating thing actually made me a little dizzy. I actually mixed it for, obviously we just sped that up a little bit. I mixed that for probably about 4 to 5 minutes total. As you can see, when we get done actually mixing everything. As you can see, when you actually get done mixing everything, if you pull it out, it actually forms peaks, which means that it's ready. You can do it so that it's not quite as stiff as this honk, but you're going to have a denser cheesecake. The idea of having this cheesecake as compared to other cheesecakes is it's very light and fluffy, and part of the reason for that happening is because of the fact that the egg whites are so beef, and not by beet, I mean like beet like you know, tad, but actually you know, beet. So what we're going to do now is we are going to remove, there's some little pieces left of the cream cheese, which is okay because they eventually all melt when you cook the cheesecake. And we're going to take our egg whites, and we are going to fold them in. You want to do this kind of quickly, just because if not, the egg whites will deflate. Fold them in, and they just sort of sit on top like that. Now what you want to do is you want to gently fold the egg whites into the mixture. You don't want to stir them in. You want to actually fold by flipping it over, going under, folding. This is the part of the baking process with the cheesecake that I actually kind of hate because it's so tedious, but, and you want to do that until the egg whites gently dissolve into the cheesecake recipe. Okay, so we have folded the egg whites into the mixture, as you can see, it is very creamy and glossy. And we have our pie crust, our cheesecake crust, next to us. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the filling, and we are going to gently, again, because you don't splatter all over the place, pouring the cheesecake filling into the pie crust. So you might notice some chunks of the cream cheese in there that's totally okay if it does that. Actually, it doesn't look like there was a whole lot of them, which is pretty cool because those will eventually, you know, mix into the cheesecake while it's baking. It's also okay that there's a lot of crust on the sides because the cheesecake will actually expand a little bit and it's okay. Now, the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to add our final ingredient before we put this baby into the oven. We're going to take some cinnamon, and this is the part that makes it where after it bakes, it gives it this great cinnamon-like layer of crust over the top that is totally amazing. It's amazing that more people don't use cinnamon on top of their cheesecake, a lot of people use other things. Bobaloo and I were talking while we were making the cheesecake, and he had mentioned something about possibly adding cocoa for like a chocolate cheesecake or maybe adding a little bit of espresso, or you said espresso, right? Yeah, to bring out the chocolate, I just seen the food network. Yeah, barefoot kitesa, which we love barefoot kitesa. A friend of mine actually made this, and she added like a mango puree to it, so it made it like a mango cheesecake, which she said it was really, really good. If you're going to add mango, I wouldn't necessarily recommend adding cinnamon, but you might want to try it. I don't know. If you try it, let me know. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the cinnamon, and we're going to put the cinnamon over the top of the cheesecake and just let it rest on there. We're not going to mix it up or anything. It's okay to use a lot of cinnamon. Wow, that smells really good. Okay, so I told you, you used a lot of cinnamon, you have to cover the whole thing. Now another thing that I'm actually started using, which my mom never used, was actually nutmeg. With nutmeg, it's a great spice, you want to use it very sparingly though, so just a little tiny bit over the top, and obviously, that's as much as you need, and that actually might have been a little too much, but that's okay. What we're going to do now, our oven is really reheated. We're going to open the oven up, we're going to take our cheesecake, and very carefully, we are going to put it into the oven with 350 degrees, and we are going to put it in for about 55 minutes, we'll be back with you in 55 minutes, and we will check out how the cheesecake looks. You know, a person can do a lot with 55 minutes during the holiday season, so many different things that get done. You can put a decoration on your Christmas tree, you can leave a review for your favorite podcast, or check out a favorite blog, work off some of those pre-holiday calories, or catch up with podcasting friends where you take Santa's little helpers for a walk, ooh, new cue cast. Well it is ready, let's check it out and see how it looks. Very nice, very nice, ooh it's a little smoky. Okay, so as you can see, the top layer of the cheesecake is formed to make a nice, almost like a, I don't know what you'd call it, like a skit. And you can see the cinnamon is baked on the top of that, and it's going to help the cinnamon flavor actually goes through the entire cheesecake, and it's very light, it's very airy, it's already starting to deflate a little bit, which is totally okay. We're going to let the cheesecake cool down, and then after it cools down a little bit, we're going to stick it in the oven, stick it in the oven, we're going to stick it in the refrigerator, let it chill overnight, tomorrow it'll be amazing, and it'll be really, really good at the Winnow Carlisle's house, which is where I'm going to be taking the cheesecake tomorrow. So thank you all very much for joining me, and I hope you guys try out the cheesecake. If you try it out and you like it, or you don't like it, or you think I can improve on it, send us an email at potasmycopilot@gmail.com, or you can leave us a comment on our blog, which is potasmycopilot.com, give us a call at 206-202-5165, and let me know just think of it. I hope you guys enjoy it, and have very happy holidays. Bye-bye. Put a deck of room? Fuck. [MUSIC PLAYING]