Dammit, I've been flossing my cheesecakes again. And I have the battle scars to prove it. The lovely, creamy confection you see above -- just released from its springform pan with the help of a #10 can of sliced pears acting as a pedestal -- extracted its little bit of blood and flesh, proving once again that baking is not for babies or whiners.
Although highly pleasurable, I'm here to tell you that flossing your cheesecake HURTS! Note as Exhibit A the angry red gashes, symmetrically carved into the first joint of each index finger, below. With burns and blisters and sore knees from standing up for eight straight hours, these are the little war wounds of baking: Subtle, painful, oddly satisfying.
I can explain. This started about a week ago, when pumpkin cheesecake was listed as the Sunday lunch dessert at the retirement home -- the grandest meal of the week at a place that serves three meals a day to 185 seniors. At first they were going to bring in pre-baked and portioned cakes from Mega Food Sourcing Vendor, which made me curse softly under my breath. I've only made a couple of cheesecakes in my life, and wanted to try them on this scale.
And then on Thursday, somebody changed their minds and the orders came down: Make 15 pumpkin cheesecakes by Saturday afternoon. I grabbed a copy of "The Joy of Cheesecake" and got to work, covering the outsides of 10-inch springform cake pans with plastic wrap and then tin foil in order to seal them from the water baths that we'd need to use. On Friday I made a huge batch of graham cracker crust (crackers whizzed to crumbs in the food processor, sugar, melted butter) and pressed a 1/2-inch bottom crust layer into each pan. Baked them for 10 minutes each so the crusts would be even and firm.
Since this is a retirement home with lots of special dietary needs, I also made one gluten-free and three sugar-free crusts, the latter using the 8-inch cake ring that I brought from home, laying it down directly onto a parchment lined baking sheet and spraying everything with a thick layer of industrial quality PAM cooking spray.
Cheesecake really isn't that hard to make. Saturday morning found me smushing up several pounds of cream cheese in the monster mixer with the paddle attachment (below). Add sugar and beat it in, and then eggs and egg yolks. Use a separate bowl for a few tablespoons of flour (or cornstarch for the gluten free version) with teaspoons of pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, ginger, cloves, a little salt), which I swirled with my hand to make it all blended and uniform, and then beat it into the cream cheese mixture. Add a cup or two of whipping cream laced with a slug of vanilla. And then, finally, I beat in a few cups of Libby's pumpkin, being careful to not overbeat any of this, mixing it just until the ingredients were uniform and I had a huge pot of batter.
The technique and skill for this, I quickly found out, lies in the actual baking. Bake it too much and the top turns dark brown (ie burns) and cracks like an Arizona state highway. Bake it too little and you have cheesecake mush. A water bath, or bain marie, is the way to go, so after placing my filled pans into a deep hotel pan and placing them in the oven, I then poured enough water into each hotel pan to reach about a third of the way up the cheesecake pan. Baked them about 45 minutes at 325 with a turn at the halfway mark (at which time I finally remembered to turn the convection fan down to low, where it should have been at the beginning).
You can also skip the water bath, turn the oven down to 275, bake for twenty minutes, turn it down to 225 and leave the cheesecakes in for an hour or more, turning once, and still praying that they won't crack or burn. I did this method with the gluten free and sugar free cakes that I made, and they worked out fine.
In either case, you bake the cheesecakes until all but the centers are firm and there is just the slightest jiggle in the middle, with a lovely amber sheen to the top of the cake. Take them out and let them cool to room temperature for hours, still in the pans, then cover them and refrigerate overnight, also still in the pans.
And then it's time to cut and serve your cheesecakes, and if, say, you work at a retirement home, you want to get 20 clean slices from each cake, with no pieces wrecked by the knife. Now the epic struggle between Man and Cheesecake begins, because the cake wants nothing more than to gob onto whatever touches its precious, creamy guts and turn each slice into a sloppy, cheesy mess that looks like it was carved by a chainsaw.
So you pull out your (preferably unflavored) dental floss, or maybe you rummage through the garage and find some leftover nylon fishing line. The fine, thin filament, wrapped around your fingers, shocks and saddens the cheesecake by cutting a perfect, fine line all the way down to its crust. And instead of pulling the floss back up through the cut, as you would have to do with a knife, you simply unwrap it from one hand and pull it through the cheesecake. Rewrap on your fingers and make the next cut. I was able to make 10 perfect cuts on each cake to get my 20 slices, without any gobs of cheesecake between the cuts.
But here's the painful part: Even though I wore gloves, after flossing a half-dozen cheesecakes I had managed to carve painful, little smiles into the places on my fingers where the floss was wrapped. These lacerations would remind me of my cheesecake-making day for over a week.
I still needed a knife to cut through the crusts, but the slices came out with clean edges, firm and lovely. And then there was great joy among the land, and the people had their pumpkin cheesecake, and ate it, too.
And so, you ask, did I save the used floss to give my teeth a nice, cheesecake-tinged swabbing that night before bed? Do jack-o-lanterns have candles inside?
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