Classic New York Cheesecake with Mixed Berry Topping/ Marble Chocolate Cheesecake

Assalamualaikum!

I remembered the first time I made cheesecake. It was for Eid when I first got here. When I first got here I didn't really know how to cook. I would go on Google and search for recipes (still do) and go to Loblaws after school and try make a decent meal out whatever I bought. We were ambitious. I was at least. Kuew Teaw (I still don’t know how to spell it) Hong Kong la, Tomyam from scratch la, apple strudles  la..and of course..cheesecake. I finally tried making a cheesecake again about a month ago and made another two on Thursday and Friday. Again, these cakes are made for a birthday. A special someone who is devoting her life for charity work. She is none other than our bonda in Montreal, Auntie Sabria. Illya and I stayed at her place when we first got here. She is always on her feet cooking for shelters, homeless people, weddings, iftars, Islamic gatherings and the list goes on. She is well known in Montreal for her contribution and of course, her big heart!

Auntie Sabria loves cheesecake, so for her birthday celebration with MSA McGill, I decided to make her a cheesecake. Since a lot of people were coming, I was told to make two cakes. Mind you, I have NOT mastered the art of making a crack-less cheesecake. My springform pan is too big for my roasting dish thus I can’t use the water bath system. Oh well.. I’m not sure if that would stop these cheesecakes from cracking. It’s really puzzling when a website tells you NOT to open the oven door as the cold air would somehow make the cake crack while other sites tells you that you should take it out immediately or some would say use water bath, some say you don't, some say check your oven….Whaaa? I really think we should have a Global Cheesecake Conference to actually come to an agreement and stop confusing clueless newbie baker like I am. Oh stahp!

I made a classic new York cheesecake with two different variations! Yeay!

Original recipe here

Classic New York Cheesecake

1 ¼ cup of finely crushed graham crackers

¼ cup of melted butter

¾ cup sugar

1 kg of creamcheese (4 packages)

1 cup sour cream

1 tablespoon vanilla

4 eggs

1. Preheat oven to 325 degree Fahrenheit (300 degrees if using a dark nonstick springform)
2. Spray the insides of a 9-inch springform. Set aside
3.  In a bowl, mix the crushed graham crackers and melted butter together. Press firmly on the bottom of spring form.
4. Bake for 10 minutes and set aside.
5. Using an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese and sugar together until well combined.
6. Add in the sour cream and vanilla and continue mixing.
7. Add in the eggs into the mixture. One at a time.
8. Pour the mixture on to the baked crust and bake for 55 minutes to 1 hour.
9. Turn off the oven and let the cheesecake rest in the oven for another hour with the oven door slightly ajar.
10. Refrigerate for a couple of hours.

 You’ll see that by this time, the middle part of the cheesecake would still be jiggly. But really, it’s done. It’ll firm up once it cools. And yes. I kid you. You are DEFINETLY welcomed to dig right innnn!Do it..I won't judge..

   

Mixed Berry Topping

¼ cup of strawberry jam (or any berries)

1 tablespoon of water

Strawberries and blueberries (Or any of your choice)

1. Mix the jam with water and heat it in the microwave for about 30 seconds.
2. Spread the jam over the top of the cheesecake.
3. Arrange the berries on the jam.

 Chocolate Marble Cheesecake

½ cup of melted chocolate

1. At step 8 (refer to NY cheesecake above), add dollops of melted chocolate in the cheesecake batter.
2. Using a knife or bamboo skewer, swirl the melted chocolate around the batter to create a marble effect.
3. Put in oven as stated in previous recipe.

  

Oh hello Grand Canyon!

Err.could this pass as art?=P

Sorry this photo is extra bad. had to rush to deliver these babies!

 

Since the marble cheesecake cracked, I melted some more chocolate and filled in the cracks. I then refrigerate it for about an hour to let the chocolate set. Teehee.

The cheesecakes were absolutely delicious! Oh wait! I didn't try the marble chocolate one. Oh well, I hope it tested great too. Hihi. Making cheesecake are definitely easy BUT, tedious if you want to make it EXACTLY perfect! If I’m eating on my own, I wouldn't mind if there’s a Grand Canyon in the middle of my cheesecake. HECK! It’s cheesecake for God sake!

Okay. Now I’m hungry..=.=’

Goodnight Lovelies!

Wasalam.

Till then,

Love,

Sofhan Hasni

Giant Oreo Cheesecake

Assalamualaikum!

I haven’t been able to blog for the past week. Three midterms down, two more to go! I decided to stay home and have a spa night for myself tonight. My body deserves to be pampered. I bought some masks at a Korean beauty store and I wanted to give them a try. Yeay! I’m currently listening to 2002,my favorite new age musicians, with two candles burning by my side. This is life…

Last night in kick boxing class, half of the class had to stand in the middle of a circle and take turns being punched in the abs by the other half of the class.  Later on we got to do the same to the other group. Heehee. Bad ass I tell ya.  “I give ‘er a ha! And a hayyya’…and I kick ‘er sir.” =P

So last time I blogged about Chocolate Cake and Nutella Mousse Filling for Safaa’s birthday and now I’m sharing with you the recipe for the other cake I made for the same party. This cake is for Omar Abdelkader or we call him Omar A or little Omar =)

I saw this Giant Oreo Cheesecake awhile ago on Youtube and I knew I just had to make it.. I’ve already decided to make this cake for Omar since neither I nor anyone else knows his favorite cake flavor. Somehow I don’t think guys talk about their favorite flavors as much as girls do. I mean..I don’t know if guys even…care? To think about it, I still don’t know what kind of desserts my brothers like…Hurmmm..

Anyways, one of our friends was sneaky enough to get Omar to tell us his favorite dessert/cake and whaddaya know! He loves cheesecake AND anything chocolate. So he would DEFINITELY love this cake!

Originally the cake is supposed to be a no-bake cheesecake. However, I couldn’t find any flavorless agar strips/powders in the grocery stores near my apartment. So I had to make a baked crust-less cheesecake instead. Not that it’s a bad thing or anything.. I’ve always preferred baked cheesecakes over no-bake ones.

So here you go, my version of Giant Oreo Cheesecake!

Crustless Oreo Cheesecake

10 Oreo Cookies, divided

 3 (250 g) packages PHILADELPHIA Cream Cheese, room temperature

 3/4 cup sugar

 1 teaspoon vanilla

 3 eggs

1. Heat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Line an 8 inch cake/springform pan with parchment paper and set aside.
3. If you are using a springform pan, make sure to wrap the bottom of the pan with a few layers of aluminum foil to avoid water from seeping in.
4. Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla in large bowl until well blended.
5. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition.
6. Separate the cookie from the cream (we only need the cookies)
7. Chop or crush cookies. Gently stir the chopped cookies into cream cheese batter.
8. Pour the cream cheese batter in the cake pan. Put the cake pan in a bigger baking dish or a roasting pan.
9. Fill the outer baking dish with boiling water. The water should come about 2/3 of the way up the cake/springform pan.
10. Bake for 35-45 minutes or until centre is almost set.
11. Let cool completely before removing it from the cake/springform pan.
12. Store in the fridge for a couple of hours or overnight

Brownies or Big “cookie” layers

6 Oreo cookies, divided

½ cup butter

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup self raising flour or (3/4 cup all purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder and ¼ teaspoon salt)

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/2 cup of chocolate chips

1. Preheat your oven to 356 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Grease and line two9 inch springforms parchment paper.
3. Place the cookie part of the Oreos into a ziplock bag and crush into fine crumbs
4. Put the butter into a bowl and melt it in the microwave.
5. Beat in the eggs into the melted butter.
6. Add the sugar and mix well.
7. Add the cocoa powder and self raising flour until well incorporated
8. Fold in the chocolate chips and cookie crumbs.
9. Divide the batter evenly into both springforms.
10. Bake in the oven for about 10-15 minutes or until the knife/ toothpick inserted in the middle of the brownie comes out clean.

 Now….If you want to make it funkier, add more details on your giant cookie!  I made chocolate sugar cookies for decoration. I halved the recipe below.

Chocolate Sugar cookies

(Makes 36)

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 1/4 cups white sugar

1 egg

1. Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt; set aside.
2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth.
3. Beat in the egg.
4. Gradually stir in the sifted ingredients to form soft dough.
5. Divide dough into 2 pieces, flatten and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 2 hours.
6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
7. Flour your kitchen counter or chopping mat with cocoa powder.
8. Roll the dough out to 1/8 inch in thickness.
9. Cut many 1 cm by 3 cm strips, 2 mini triangles and letter for your word of choice.
10. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Note: I printed out a template of the word on a piece of paper and cut out the letters. I simply pout the cut out letters and ran a knife around them.

To assemble

1. Place one layer of the brownie on a plate followed by the cheesecake and the other layer of brownie.
2. Arrange the sugar cookies on the brownie with the mini strips as a boarder and the letters in the middle.
3. Use melted chocolate as a glue to secure the decorations in place.

  

One of the things that I’ve learned while making this cake is that, brownies hardens really really fast. Two reasons why I never knew this..1) I’m not a big brownie lover 2) I never made one from scratch.

Since I baked this a day or two ahead, I wrapped these brownies in cling wrap with two slices of bread and kept in a big (if possible) air tight container. The magic of bread! This trick works for most cakes and cupcakes too. Somehow the moisture from the bread would moisten the air in the container thus keeping your baked goods from drying. The bread on the other hand would lose its moisture and harden. But hey! You could always make croutons or bread crumbs from that!:D

The other thing that I learned or I actually forgot to do was to use cocoa powder instead of flour while rolling my cookies out. That's why my cookies had white specks on them!=P

Original idea and brownie recipe from here

Original Oreo cheesecake recipe from here

Original chocolate sugar cookie recipe from here

Phew!That was a longggggg one!! I better sleep soon. I need to start studying for my Linguistics midterm next week!AYAYAYYY!

Take care everyone!

Wasalam

Love, 

Sofhan Hasni 

Chocolate Cake with Nutella Mousse Filling for our dearest Safaa

Assalamualaikum!

January was a busy month; February would be a lot worse!  Five midterms in the duration of two weeks. DIE DIE DIE! Hah! InsyaAllah, I can DO THIS! I should be doing my linguistics homework/ print notes/choose outfit for MFW/ laundry right now but procrastination is indeed my second middle name. My name should read Sofhan Jameela Procastination Hasni. Lame. I know…Moving on shall we?

On Jan 25^th, we celebrated Omar A and Safaa’s birthdays together at Noreen and Sarah’s place. It was great to meet everyone again. Most of us met at Frosh 3 years ago. THREE years ago. How time flies. Some are graduating and perhaps moving on to a different place or I know one of them secured a job in Montréal as a consultant (soo proud!), some are working super hard to get into med school, some are still planning their future and then there’s me, a girl obsessed with cakes. Hah! We decided it was time to get together one more time since the last time we all got together was more than a year ago and who knows when else would we have the chance. *sobs* Okay okay…no more sad stories..Let’s talk about cakes!

Planning a cake for Safaa was easy. I met her before the winter break and told her how I usually give people birthday cakes as gifts. She hinted that her birthday was coming up soon and she likes anything chocolate, especially Nutella (somewhere along that line). That’s very subtle Safaa! At first I thought of making Nutella chocolate cake. However, I’m not sure if the cake is going to taste Nutella-ish as I would like it to be and it hit me, why not make a chocolate cake with Nutella Mousse filling? It was a perfect idea. But .. because the mousse is not exactly a mousse , I could only put a thin layer of mousse in between the layers or It’ll ooze out creating a mess. =( Since the consistency of the mousse is too thin to cover the cake. So I made Nutella butter cream instead. What’s the recipe for the butter cream you ask? I don’t know. To be honest, I couldn’t really remember. I remembered what I put in, but can’t remember the ratio…some other time perhaps..I was rushing to finish the cake, get dressed, pray AND head out.

Even the butter cream was giving me trouble! It was not as smooth as I would like. I felt like giving up! *Cries* But then again, I don’t want Safaa to think I don’t love her enough if I brought a crappy cake or worse..a store bought one *gasps*.  With a little bit of prayers, Ding! Why don’t I crumb some chocolate biscuits and cover the sides of the cake with it? I topped the cakes with some Lindt chocolates. Alhamdulillah. It turned out great!Phew!

Chocolate Cake with Nutella Mousse Filling

I made a layer (halved the recipe) of chocolate cake (recipe here) 

 Nutella Mousse (recipe here).

See how the Mousse oozes out?Not exactly something you would complain about....

credits to Miss Hanafi

credits to Miss Hanafi

Safaa is one of the people who have truly inspired me. She may be small in size but she has guts. Legit guts. She did numerous bungee jumps, she skydived like nobody’s business, incredibly smart, lovable, dependable and absolutely fearless. All my life I have been scared to try new things or do crazy stuffs and then I met this girl. Soft spoken and polite and bam (!) missed a day of Frosh to join the white water rafting. Say what? Ask her about her school breaks and I could assure you that you would be blown away with her stories. When I saw her boldness to do so many things without breaking a sweat, I asked myself, if she could be that brave, why can’t I? So from then on, I took down some of the invisible walls around me that are not protecting me from harm but preventing me from enjoying life. Safaa if you’re reading this, Happy Birthday again! Lots of love! All the best for your last semester and good luck in your future endeavors. Go ahead and conquer the world, we all know that you are capable of doing just that! *HUGS!*

If you are wondering why I keep on using the word Ding, Phew, Bam, Wobdedoos and what not, the way I write in my blog is the same way as I speak (minus the weird frantic hand gestures and facial expressions that comes with it). =D

Wasalam.

Till then,

Love, 

Sofhan Hasni