Baby Lemon Cheesecake

This recipe begins by making a biscuit, which acts as the crust for the cake. It amused me that in this case, the biscuit name is actually literal — bis (meaning twice) and cuit (meaning cooked). It’s baked once on its own, then goes into the oven again as the base of the cheesecake. I’m easily amused.

Mise en place for biscuit

For the biscuit, you basically beat egg yolks and sugar until very light and fluffy, mix in flour and vanilla, beat egg whites into a meringue, then fold the two together, spread into a sheet pan, and bake.

Baked Biscuit

Let that cool, which doesn’t take long because it’s so thin, then cut into rounds, about the size of the bottom of whatever you’re baking this in. I had leftovers, which I stashed in the freezer. Hopefully the texture won’t suffer too much.

Leftover biscuit

Once you’ve lined the bottoms of your molds, get the cheesecake batter ready: sour cream, cream cheese, lemon juice, and eggs. I halved the recipe, because my silicone cupcake liners are about half the size called for in the recipe. In retrospect, this is probably why they baked up much quicker than the recipe called for.

Mise en place for cheesecake

Pour the batter into the molds, then fill the outer pan with hot water for a water bath.

Into the oven we go

After baking, and when the cakes have had a chance to chill in the fridge, make the lemon curd. I didn’t take any good pictures of this process, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Spread the lemon curd as evenly as you can on the cakes, then chill again for a couple of hours before attempting to unmold.

Finished Cheesecakes

Jay really enjoyed these, and as I said above — anything that hints of cheesecake isn’t allowed to leave the house, so his was the only feedback I got. He thought they might be better with a more solid crust, but I think that’s because the temptation with anything ‘cupcake’ size is to want to eat it with your fingers. These are just a bit messy for that. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with these, but they weren’t my favourite dessert ever or anything. They don’t contain nearly enough chocolate for that.

Mise en Place

This recipe, again, follows Rose’s standard butter cake method. Mix dry ingredients with sugar, add some liquid and the butter, beat, then add eggs and the rest of the liquid in 2 stages.

After mixing the butter and most of the sour cream into the dry ingredients, I was almost certain that I’d done something horribly wrong. Look at the “batter”! I could make cookies out of that!

It looks like a dough!

I knew that mixture would never beat up to the point of light and fluffy, so I added a splash or two of the egg mixture to smooth it out a bit before the “beat for 1 1/2 minutes” step. That helped tremendously, and I moved along to adding the rest of the egg mixture with no major mishaps.

Swoosh!

I spread the batter in my boring old Bundt pan (go look at Raymond or Nancy‘s blogs to see the beauty that a bundt cake can be).

Doesn't look like much...

After it comes out of the oven, you poke it with a stick (ok, skewer, but that’s not as much fun to say), then drown it in lemon syrup. Ta-da!

I love the light that comes in this window. I think it's the only thing I like about this kitchen.

Then go feed your hungry co-workers. At least, I think they must be hungry, because my plate always comes home with nothing but crumbs on it, and sometimes it doesn’t even have many of those.

Anton said it was refreshingly lemony. Sergey said it had a “moist skin”, and came back for a small second sliver later in the afternoon. Matt said “The whole thing is moist.” Adam got the last piece again, and scraped most of the crumbs off the serving plate. Martin took two pieces, claiming he had someone visiting, but I think he just wanted both for himself. Jay agrees with Marie‘s husband Jim and says “I wouldn’t know”. To be fair to me, though, I asked if he wanted a piece and he said “Does it have frosting?”. I looked at him and looked at the cake and said “Does it look like it does?” “Take it to work.” I don’t think he likes poppy seeds. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical about the quantity of poppy seeds, but I’m glad I made the recipe as written. I really liked the texture they provided.

My favourite non-fiction books!

Curd Mise en Place

See all the lemon zest in there under the strainer? Yeah, I misread the recipe and used all of my zest there, rather than saving some for the cake. Oops. On to cooking the curd. Our kitchen has such bad lighting that I couldn’t tell when it went from translucent to opaque, but I can see it clearly now in the pictures!

Translucent

Opaque!

As someone else mentioned, once you’ve done this sort of thing a few times, it becomes fairly intuitive as to when it’s properly cooked. It doesn’t even take as much practice as you might expect.

Next day was making the cake layers. I decided to do the entire batch in a single 12″ square pan. This way I could cut it in half, torte each half, and stack it all up. This also meant I could cut it ahead of time into little individual portions (picture later). The cake is a fairly standard butter cake, but the addition of white chocolate provides a wonderful tenderness.

Cake Mise en Place

I expected the batter to take me a little longer to mix up than it did, so I ended up having to keep the prepared cake sitting on the counter for a bit while I waited for a sourdough loaf to finish baking. It turns out I didn’t wait long enough and the sourdough ended up doughy, but my husband and I are enjoying it as toast. So, into the prepared pan the batter goes. I put a flower nail upside down in the centre of the pan first, as a bit of a heating core. The batter was so thin in the pan that I was sure this would be next to impossible to torte, but I forged ahead anyway.

12 inch square with flower nail

The cake came out perfectly level with a beautiful crumb.

Cut cake with sourdough in background

So, I stacked the layers with a piece of greaseproof cardboard in between, wrapped them up and stored them overnight in the fridge.

Next up: the white chocolate lemon buttercream!

I took my mise en place pictures twice. See if you can spot where I went wrong, before I re-read the recipe and fixed my mistake.

Buttercream Mise en Place 1

Buttercream Mise en Place 2

If you guessed that I should be using the saucepan for simmering water instead of directly for melting my butter, white chocolate and scraped vanilla beans, you guessed right!

Now, if you read my previous post, you know that despite fixing that error, I still had problems at this stage. Something caused my white chocolate to seize. I tried beating it back together with my hand mixer, but it didn’t help at all. Since adding eggs was the next step, I gradually beat those in, using my electric hand mixer, and ended up with a smooth and creamy custard. I was too embarrassed and frustrated to take a picture of the broken mess, but I’m really glad I didn’t throw it out. For one thing, it would have been an hour round-trip to get replacement white chocolate, and I definitely wouldn’t have finished the frosting that evening.

White Chocolate Custard Base, fixed!

After letting that reach the required temperature, then cooling it down, you beat up the butter, then beat the custard into that. I absolutely loved the flavour of this frosting at this stage. I said to my husband, “I really don’t like white chocolate, but I think this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” It was like licking the beaters from vanilla cake batter, but without the uncooked flour & egg taste. Seriously fantastic, and I think it’s going to become my go-to frosting for a cake that doesn’t require a solid white base for decorating. Since this was going on a lemon cake, though, I forged ahead and added the lemon curd, though I have to admit I didn’t wait 2 hours.

I did put the frosting into the fridge overnight, and tackled assembly the next day.

Assembled cake

My assembled cake doesn’t look all that great, but it doesn’t look too bad after cutting off the sloppy edges and cutting it up into servings.

Woody's Lemon Luxury Layer Cake

You can see my leftover bits of baby chocolate oblivion there, too. I added a little swirl of a peanut butter buttercream sort of thing. I basically took a recipe for “Reese’s peanut butter filling” and beat in some butter to thicken it up a bit and smooth it out to my tastes. The chocolate Oblivions and lemon layer cake were both big hits at our party, and I think my cousins went home with too much sugar and holding their stomachs. My coworkers finished up the handful of leftovers today at work.