Ethnic Flavor: Salted Caramel Cheesecake Bars for Shavuot

Shavout, the holiday where we celebrate receiving the Torah, is nearly upon us.    This is one of my favorite holidays, and not just because it is traditional to eat dairy foods on Shavout, but that does make it extra sweet.  One food that people love to eat on Shavout is cheesecake.  Although a plain, well made cheesecake can be delicious (and a poorly made one can be disastrous), I think cheesecake is the perfect canvas to experiment with other flavors.  This year, I decided to make these salted caramel cheesecake bars to bring to Shavuot services.  I have made them before and they were a huge hit, so I can't wait to see how people react to them on Wednesday.  They are a little bit salty, a little bit sweet and a little bit tangy with a buttery crust.  When you bite into one, the flavor just melds together in your mouth into one delicious bite.

If salted caramel cheesecake isn't your thing (and who are you??), then you can try any of these other cheesecake recipes.  

Raspberry swirl cheesecake

White chocolate cheesecake

Oreo cheesecake

Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte

Black Bottom Cupcakes

Wow, we love cheesecake on this blog.  Anyway, here is the recipe for salted caramel cheesecake bars.

MSC Club: Raspberry Swirl Cheesecakes

These almost didn't happen (I realize this is often a theme with baking groups).  In fact, I made them yesterday morning beginning at 6:30am.  Often, if I have all the ingredients, I feel guilty not baking, especially if one of my fellow bakers is hosting.


Anyway, this month's selection for Martha Stewart's Cupcake club was raspberry swirl cheesecakes.  The last mini cheesecakes we made for this club, the oreo ones, were so delicious, that I knew these would be good too.  They were easy to put together -- graham cracker crust, quick cheesecake batter and raspberry puree swirled in before they went in the oven.  However, this was a case of read the whole recipe before starting because I learned that they have to be baked in a water bath.  I don't have a roasting pan big enough for my cupcake tins, so I lowered the temperature and baked them without the water.  They puffed up beautifully, but once they started to cool, the majorly sunk, which I assume was related to my baking method.


I haven't had a chance to try them yet, but I assume they are delicious.  Cheesecake and raspberry -- what could be bad about that?  Many thanks to Gem of Cupcake Crazy Gem for hosting.  Check out the MSC website for all the other bakers.

These Cupcakes Are So Good, It's Scaaaaaaary!

a) I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog to The Baking Sarah. Time to pull your weight, sisters.

b) Tomorrow is Halloween! I had a long-simmering plan to make these delicious cupcakes for Halloween, but with the special limited-edition Halloween Oreos with the orange cream filling. Unfortunately, last year I simply could not find said Oreos in Providence, and so I had to be content with making regular ones. I was very content, though - they were delicious! All the rich, satisfying creaminess of Oreo cheesecake, all in a convenient cupcake-size package. What could be better? Anyway, the plan continued to simmer in my mind, and when I saw the orange Oreos at my local supermarket here in the Greatest City on Earth, I nabbed them! (Never mind that Halloween was more than three weeks away - in my cabinet they sat until they were ready to meet their delicious, delicious fate.) I brought them in to work for a special Halloween edition of Baked Goods Fridays. I have to say, I feared that I was pushing the limits of what people in my office were willing to eat at 9 a.m. with these babies, but they came through, and all the cupcakes were gone by lunchtime!

There's one thing I must warn you about. I probably should have caught on to the fact that a recipe containing two pounds of cream cheese would make a LOT of cupcakes, but I naively believed Martha Stewart when she said it would make 30. Try 60. After I had filled all the Oreo-bottomed cups with batter, I still had half the batter left over, so I made 30 more without any Oreos at the bottom. They were still good, but the crunch of the Oreo (not to mention the special color) combined with the smoothness of the cheesecake is what makes this cupcake a winner. So next time I will halve the recipe. Or buy more Oreos!

You can find the recipe here. Happy Halloween!

MSC September: Cookies and Cream Cupcakes that Almost Didn't Get Made

Imagine for a moment that you just started a new job, and it is at a synagogue, and Rosh Hashanah is 2 days after Labor Day, and the kick-off for the religious school you are running is one day before Rosh Hashanah.  As you can probably imagine, I was super busy and didn't have a lot of baking time.

Then, I saw that this month's Martha Stewart Cupcake Club selection, by Nina from Nina's Cupcakes, was cookies and cream cupcakes -- also known as oreo cheesecakes with oreo cookie crusts.  Yummy.  And, they seemed fairly easy.  I decided I would take some of these to my office and give some to my friend Mike for his birthday.

We had to work on Labor day this year because of the holidays and the start of school, so I thought these would be a nice treat, even if it didn't totally make up for being in the office on a holiday.  The people in my office don't often eat that much.  They eat lunch and everything, but cookies and other baked goods don't seem to hold the same allure as they did in my husband's office.  I thought I would have a bunch left over and would drive them to Mike after work on Labor Day.

The best laid plans...these were devoured in an instant.  There were none left for Mike (sorry Mike!).  I guess people liked these cupcakes a lot.  They weren't too heavy, even for cheesecake and the oreos stayed pretty crunchy on the bottom, which was a nice contrast.  Nina, thanks for the great pick and the people in my office thank you too!

You can find the recipe in Martha Stewart's Cupcakes. 

How I Got On This Blog: White Chocolate Cheesecake

As I've said before, I am not nearly as fancy of a baker as my sisters. I lack a lot of their equipment, and also their patience. That is not to say, though, that I lack their drive to find the most delicious creations. I just look in different places-- and this time, my quest was successful, and now I am here and writing for all of you.

The White Chocolate Cheesecake is an excellent example of the search for a dessert that is both very easy and intensely delicious. I first encountered this pie at my friend Rachel's house, where she assured me that it was best not to ask what was in it until after I had tried it. That turned out to be great advice, because it sounds gross but tastes amazing. It's also incredibly easy to make, and actually involves no cooking or baking at all. However, you wouldn't know it from the taste. In fact, my friend Josh assures me that I will be his best friend forever, if only I continue to make him this pie.

A couple of notes on the recipe. It can be found here, but I usually make a few modifications. First, I have never been able to find white chocolate pudding mix, but I use vanilla pudding and it's just as delicious. Also, for the garnish, I usually use mini chocolate chips instead of chocolate curls. Finally, the crust gets soggy if you let the filling sit in it for too long, so I recommend making the transfer an hour or so before eating it, so it has time to set but stays crunchy.

Seriously Amazing Black Bottom Cupcakes

If you like black bottom cupcakes, or the combination of chocolate and cheesecake, you have to try these cupcakes.  I like black bottom cupcakes, but I haven't had them in a while.  We had a bunch of cream cheese sitting in the fridge and I had seen these on cookie madness, so I decided to try these out.

Anna, the author of cookie madness, spent a few days making different recipes to come up with the ultimate black bottom cupcake recipe and I am glad she did.  She is a genius!  And so sweet.  When I commented on her blog that I liked the cupcakes, she took the time to visit our blog and write me a nice email back.  

Anyway, back to the greatness of these cupcakes.  They are really simple to make, even though they involve two different kinds of batter.  You just scoop some of the cream cheese into the chocolate cake and stick them in the oven.  There was some left over cream cheese batter, so I decided to do an experiment.  I crushed up some graham crackers and put them in the bottom of the cupcake tins and then baked three mini cheesecakes.  They were quite good too, and a nice way to use up the leftover batter.

These freeze really well and defrost quickly (I had to put them in the freezer to keep from eating them all at once).  A delicious treat!

You can find the recipe here.  I skipped the chocolate chips, but they were still yummy.

Ethnic Flavor: A Shavuot Treat

For those of you not fortunate enough to be Chosen, Shavuot is the holiday celebrating blintzes, fruit baskets, picnics and cakes in the shape of the Ten Commandments- or so I always believed. Actually, it celebrates the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, and we follow this awesome event to its logical conclusion and eat dairy products. Of course.

Which is basically Sarah's way of saying that she has no idea why the correlation between Shavuot and dairy exists, but in a culture as meat-obsessed at Judaism's, this can be a welcome relief. It is also a fine yearly excuse to consume the world's richest dessert, cheesecake!

Sarah has been experimenting with cheesecake a lot this year, including a lemon cheesecake for her friend Warren's birthday, a chocolate marbled cheesecake for Rebecca's Derekh Torah class, and little baby cheesecakes in ramekins. This was the greatest adventure yet, because it featured many interesting and different aspects, such as a sweet cookie crust (rather than graham cracker), raspberry jam (to which Rebecca added some fresh chopped raspberries), cottage cheese instead of some of the cream cheese (which made it a little bit lighter), and spices such as nutmeg (which Rebecca's husband was really obsessed with, to the point that he called it a "Nutmeg Raspberry Cheesecake," which is very far from the truth).

The recipe we used was Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte, from pg. 240 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours- a choice of cookbook which will shock loyal readers. Don't worry, we have some variety coming up.

The cheesecake was a not-so-light delight- it was still cheesecake, but it was not as dense and rich as a normal cheesecake. The main issue that we had was with the crust, which puffed up a lot in the oven due to our using a small amount of orzo in place of proper pie weights. (Ghetto cooking- it can happen anywhere.) It wasn't a big deal but it made the cake hard to cut because the crust ended up being very thick. The jam added a very nice, subtle compliment, and though it looked like it had seeped into the crust before we baked the cheesecake, you couldn't taste it afterwards. The batter is very runny, so don't be worried if it seems more liquid than usual. The finished product also wasn't as white as it looked in the book, because of the spices, but that did not detract from its taste at all! It was Torah-iffic! haw haw haw.