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Strawberry Rhubarb Cheesecake

Strawberry rhubarb cheesecake for Father’s Day! My in-laws, and especially my father-in-law, are big fans of cheesecake, so it was the natural choice for Father’s Day. The big question was the flavor. That ended up being a no-brainer as well. The week of father’s day we got both rhubarb and strawberries in our CSA share, so I knew I had to use them. Rather than try to get super fancy and flavor the actual cheesecake, I decided to go more traditional and put a layer of compote on top.

I made (way more than I needed) compote following this recipe from Laylita’s Recipes. It’s basically equal parts strawberries and rhubarb, with some sugar and water and a bit of lemon juice, that you cook down for a while. I ended up adding a small amount of cornstarch because it wasn’t getting as thick as I wanted naturally. I wanted to make sure it would stand as a layer on top of the cheesecake and not make a runny mess. I want strawberry rhubarb cheesecake, not strawberry rhubarb soup.

With the compote ready I moved on to the cheesecake. I have tried all of, no-bake, water bath, and just plain baked before, and I like just plain baked the best. I’m sure you can make great cheesecake all these ways, but I’ve had bad luck with the others.

My go-to recipe (after my previous mixed results) is Sugar Spun Run’s “The Best Cheesecake Recipe”. So far at least in my experience, it really is the best cheesecake recipe.

Ta-da!

Putting it Together

To put it all together I made some fresh whipped cream and piped a border. I then poured in some compote and spread it out. Between the whipped cream border and the thickness of the compote, I had zero running issues. To top it off I made a (barely artistic) center flourish with some more whipped cream and slices of strawberry.

A View After Cutting

A Slice Ready To Eat

June 27, 2021
Banana Cream Pie for Pi Day!

When my wife requested Banana Cream Pie for Pi Day, I was dubious. I didn’t really know what it was. Sure I’ve heard of it, When but I don’t think I’d ever actually had it. And, banana.. pie.. it just sounds weird. After making this pie, I was sold.

Look at that banana cream pie!

Making the Pie

For the actual pie recipe, I turned to one of my go-to’s and basically followed Sally’s recipe. The only real differences you can pretty clearly see. I didn’t cover the whole top with banana slices. I decided to brûlée some bananas for decoration and just add a few plain slices.

When I went to torch the bananas I discovered my kitchen torch wasn’t working. Luckily I had a torch lighter, and made it work, although it was a pain. Basically had to do 1 slice, and then let the lighter cool down for a few minutes before doing the next one. (I’ve bought a new torch) I also melted some chocolate and made chocolate twirls, which were a really nice effect in real life but don’t come through great in the photos because they are so dark. I also spent a long time piping stars on the whole top of the pie, with homemade whipped cream.

Banana Cream Pie Ready to Cut

In the above photo you can see a few of my baking related Christmas presents in use, I believe for the first time. I asked for a nice cake service set, and some nice flour sack towels. I just said ‘something that will look good in photos’ and she picked out this awesome set from Inox Artisans that I really like. The towels come from an etsy store called Fiber & Mud and are are hand-dyed indigo.

I swear I took pictures of the pie cut, and of a slice, but for the life of me I can’t find any. The pie was actually eaten, you just have to take my word for it. And it was good. Here’s another picture of the whole pie instead.

Banana Cream Pie

April 9, 2021
Speculoos Hamentaschen
Speculoos Hamentaschen for Purim!

I hadn’t baked for almost a month because I came down with covid19. The good news is, I recovered, and I’m fine now. Feeling better happened to correspond to the time of Purim, so this was a perfect bake to get back into things.

Hamentaschen

Now in my mind, there is pretty much one best type of hamentaschen, and all the rest pale in comparison. Poppyseed, or mohn in Yiddish. These are what I make most years. This year I didn’t have a chance to go to the store and get the filling (see covid19+ above). So I got creative this year, I had a jar of Trader Joe’s speculoos in the cupboard, and I wondered if I could use that. Well, sure enough, I found a recipe over at myjewishlearning.com.
Speculoos Hamantaschen

Traditional hamentaschen with a non traditional speculoos filling.
½ cup unsalted butter
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 Tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
Hamentaschen
Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth in stand mixer with paddle attachement.
Add egg, milk and vanilla until mixed thoroughly.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl.
Add dry mixture to wet mixture until incorporated.
Chill dough for 2 hours
Dust work surface with powdered sugar. Roll out dough to 1/4" thick (or your preference but I find thinner hard to work with).
Cut out ~3inch circles, you can use a circular cutter, or I just used a tin can with both sides removed.
Dab about a teaspoon if speculoos into the center of each circle.
Eggwash the rest of the circle around the filling, this helps it stick together.
Fold into triangles.
Preheat oven to 400F while chilling the assembled hamentaschen in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
Bake for 8 minutes or until they start to get golden brown.
Decorating
This is of course optional, but I finished with some melted chocalte drizzled on top, and pearl sugar sprinkled onto that.
Hamentaschen

They came out great! A bit on the cakey side.. I tried making thinner ones and had a lot of trouble getting them to stay together. Next batch I’ll do 1/4″ again, but add a couple of minutes to the baking time to get them to crisp up a bit more.
February 28, 2021
Chocolate Babka for GBBO Week 4

Chocolate Babka is one of my favorite things to eat and to bake, so I was thrilled it was a challenge for the GBBO bake along.

I usually follow Uri Scheft’s (of Breads Bakery) recipe for babka. Breads Bakery is a fantastic bakery in NYC and the chocolate babka is their signature. They also do fun stuff for most of the Jewish holidays. I’ll probably use their hamentashen recipe in a few weeks for Purim.

Chocolate Babka

Ironically the one time I really wanted to show off the babka I made it didn’t come out as good as it normally does. I was a bit rushed to get it made in time for the challenge. I didn’t do as good a job twisting and forming as I usually do and you can really see that in the crumb shot..

Babka Crumb

There should be swirls all through it. As you can see, it was kind of jsut one ribbon of chocolate running through it. That being said, it was still delicious!

For proof that I can, and usually do, do a better job than this.. I refer you back to my Friendsgiving Babkas I made back in 2019 when seeing friends was still a thing. They looked more like this..

January 26, 2021
Rainbow Bagels for GBBO Week 3

Rainbow bagels. I was really hoping this wouldn’t be the challenge, but what can you do? As a Jewish New Yorker, I take bagels pretty seriously. The rainbow bagel is a goofy gimmick that really doesn’t need to exist. To put this in perspective, I object to the cinnamon raisin bagel (much to my wife’s dismay). But a challenge is a challenge, so I made them. It didn’t go all that well.

Rainbow Bagels.. I Guess

I Can Make Bagels

For the record, I know how to make bagels. I’ve never posted them before on the blog, but it’s something I make somewhat regularly, with much better results than the above imply. For example, here is a previous batch..

Less Horrible Bagels

Perfect? No. But way better. The process for rainbow bagels is basically make the dough as you would normally, then divide it into 6 parts and dye each part a different color. This was my first challenge, this isn’t buttercream. Working the color in to the dough was very difficult, and a huge mess. The net step I’ve seen done two different ways. On GBBO they made 6 strands and sort of braided them together. Some folks recommend flattening out the 6 pieces and stacking them then kind of forming a circle and twisting it. I did a bit of a combo of the two which sort of turned in to just mashing it all together because I could not get the 6 pieces to reincorporate and attach very well. So you end up with this..

Unidentified Yeasty Object

I think you could best describe what I made as what a bagel would look like if you ate it while on acid. The good news is, they tasted just fine. They were a bit weird to eat because of the construction issues from the dough(s), but they were pretty decent to eat. That being said, next time I make bagels I won’t be doing the rainbow variation.

January 7, 2021