Baked Blueberry Cheesecake

This was my second attempt at making cheesecake. The first time, I used a New York cheesecake recipe from the Joy of Baking website and while the results were OK, the cheesecake was more moussy and lacked the dense richness of true NY cheesecake.

This time, I decided to try a different recipe entirely and used the baked cheesecake recipe from Coco & Me, one of my favourite baking and all-round food blogs. My presentation's nowhere near as good as Tamami-san's, but not bad for an amateur, I guess :)

I added blueberries as they were very cheap and fresh(ly imported from Chile/USA) at my local market - HK$10 (about US$1.30) for two 125 punnets. It's a little disturbing how cheap they were but blueberries are usually quite hard to find here so I jumped at the opportunity to have some. (I'm determined not to feel tooooo guilty about the carbon footprint etc because I try to eat local/regional fruit & veg but they just don't grow berries in Asia yet!)

I made a couple of minor alterations to the cheesecake recipe:

• I upped the lemon juice a bit to 20ml and reduced the sugar slightly as I don't like overly sweet cakes.
  
• After baking it 30 minutes in the oven, I took it out to cool.
  
• Then I spread on the sour cream topping (combined 150g sour cream, 2 tablespoons of vanilla sugar) and baked it a further 10 minutes in the oven.
  
• Take out and let cool; decorate with blueberries and let stand overnight.
  

Unfortunately, I think I overbaked the cheesecake a little this time, as it was not quite wobbly enough when I took it out of the oven (cheesecake is very dense so it continues to cook for a bit after you take it out), but not bad for my second-ever attempt at cheesecake!



Post-script (the day after):
Finally cut into and tasted the cheesecake after a day of chilling and waiting. I was very nervous on account of having baked it for so long, and because I was bringing to a family dinner with lots of people on Lunar New Year Eve. The taste and texture was amazing (dense but not too heavy, not too sweet to obscure the fresh cream cheese taste) though I might bake it a few minutes less next time. I got rave reviews for the cheesecake, though I can't take that much of the credit: Thanks to Tamami for the cheesecake recipe, and to Joy of Baking for sour cream topping recipe!

New York Cheesecake

I've read many cheesecake recipes before and been intimidated by the idea of water baths, over-cooking, and various stories of woe, so it was only after much thought and trepidation, I finally made the leap and tried to make my very first cheesecake.


I followed Nigella Lawson's New York cheesecake recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess, combined with the Joy of Baking recipe. I whisked the egg whites as per Nigella's recipe, but the resulting cheesecake, while OK, was a bit too light and moussy for my liking (see above). I was looking for the wonderfully rich and dense texture of real New York cheesecake, so next time I think I'll try the Joy of Baking recipe which calls for whole eggs (i.e. without whisked whites).


The sides also stuck to the pan, and it was hard to get the cake out of the Springform tin. Nigella's recipe doesn't tell you to grease the pan, but I've seen others that do. I'm going to try greasing the pan next time.