Hi everyone! I am Dyann and welcome to Dyann Bakes. Before I get started today, I want to share some really fun news with you. Libsyn, the company that host our website they have chosen Dyann Bakes as one of their favorite podcast. And they are featuring us on their podcast Libsyn Soundoff.
So here is their website and go visit and check it out, it's really a great website and thanks to all the guys at Libsyn for recognizing the Dyann Bakes team, and thanks to all of you for increasing our viewership and really bringing us to the forefront.
Okay here I have all the ingredients for today's podcast, which is about cheese cake. And the recipe that we are going to make today is called a No-Frills Cheese Cake and comes from master chef Nick Malgieri, who is the head of the Institute of Culinary Education, my alma mater. And it really is the perfect name for this recipe because it's easy, it's simple and it comes out creamy and perfect every single time.
Here are the ingredients. We have cream cheese, granulated sugar, eggs, vanilla and lemon juice. Now, in order to make a cheese cake that has a nice consistent texture to it, it's really important that you don't incorporate a lot of air and the way that you accomplish that is that most importantly your cream cheese is at room temperature. So this has been sitting out since this morning. And what you'll see is that I am going to mix the cream cheese with the sugar and take it off the mixer a number of times because it's important that it gets nice and smooth and that the sugar gets incorporated.
So here we go. The recipe for this as you have seen before, we have on the website. It's in a PDF form, so you can print it out. It's a lot of cream cheese. This is going to make a two eight inch cakes. So now this is a little messy but you have to bear with it. I put my beater on, so now I am going to add the granulated sugar. And the sugar acts as an abrasive and helps the cream cheese get smooth. So just lift this up and turn on.
Now as I said you have to scrape it down because it really get stuck. See a lot of get all stuck on the beater. And you have to scrape it off. It takes a little time but it's really worth it. So this step is finished, and sugar is been incorporated. The cream cheese is nice and smooth, and now I am going to add the lemon juice and the vanilla. After I finished adding these, I am going to going to scrape it down again just like we did before.
The next step are the eggs. And you want to add them two at a time and back to the theme of not incorporating a lot of air, add them in and mix it only until they are just absorbed. You don't look to get an air and get it off fluffy because then what happens is your batter has too much air in it. When you bake it, it will actually soufflé in the oven and then when it cools it collapses. I am sure you have all seen cheese cakes where they look like, they have just big craters, that's what we want to avoid. You want a cheese that's nice and level, nice and smooth on top.
So I have six eggs here and I am going to add the first two. Now I am going to add two more eggs, and mix again until they are just incorporated. And the last two. Cheese cake really isn't a cake it's a custard. So that's, if you keep that in mind that's the kind of batter that you are making. It's really not a cake batter.
The thing you have to keep in mind is adding the eggs will not get rid of your lumps, so you have to make sure that the batter is smooth when it's at the cream cheese stage. If you add the eggs and it's lumpy, then you are just going to have lumpy batter. Back on the mixer for just a moment longer. I can't see, there we go, okay.
Okay, so now this is done. And I didn't show you before, I forgot, so here I have a prepared pan, this is a springform pan. Usually in cheese cake recipes they recommend that you use a springform pan, but you don't have to, you can use a regular pan. And what I have here on the bottom is a very shallow crust, that is made up of ground pecans and a little granulated sugar and a little butter. The butter acts as the glue and then you press it into the bottom of the pan and bake it in the oven maybe about 10 minutes on a very low temperature, so it sets. And now we are going to pore the batter into our prepared pan.
This as I said before is a lot of batter. It's for two eight inch cakes. So we are not going to use all the batter for this pan here. See where that comes off. Little more we want it to be about a quarter of an inch from the top of the pan. Isn't it pretty? It's really delicious batter, delicious cake.
Okay, now smooth this just a little. You want to give it a couple of slams because this will make air come up to the top and you'll see little air bubbles and you can pop those easily so. It's better not to have them in the cake. There we go, very nice.
Okay, now one of the biggest problem with cheese cake is that they crack. So how do you avoid that? When a cheese cakes bakes the moisture in it evaporates, that's what causes the crack.
So the way that you can get around it is by baking it in a water bath. It's called the bain-marie. Let me show you how you do that. It's easy, you just take a pan and you put your cake pan on the pan and then fill this pan up to a certain point with water.
Now I am going to put this in the oven 325 degree oven nice slow oven, nice slow temperature, because this is a very delicate cake and then when it's in the oven, I am going to fill it with water. The idea of putting water in the pan and then carrying it over to the oven isn't the smartest thing. So now I am going to add the water to make the bath and that's going to create steam and moisture in the oven and that's going to keep the cake from cracking.
Okay so now we have our final product, our beautiful No-Frills Cheese Cake and let me back track for you just a little bit. This was baked in a 325 degree oven in a water bath, that created a lot of steam, a lot of humidity in the oven and as you can see this cheese cake has not cracked. It has a beautiful smooth surface. It also is not browned which is an important thing for a good cheese cake. You don't want it to be overcooked and sometimes when it's browned that's a sign of that.
I didn't explained to you when is a cheese cake done. And when you take out of the oven what you need to do is give the pan a jiggle. And when you do that the middle of the cake should have a little bit of a wiggle to it. The outside edges should be firm but the center should have some jiggle to it. And that makes perfect sense because as I mentioned before a cheese cake is a custard, you cook it to that stage and then you put it in the refrigerator and that's when it really sets up.
So that's what I have done with this cake. This was bake the other day and it was in there fridge for at least 24 hours overnight, and it chills up and it just come out beautiful. Thanks for watching. Give it a try and let us know how you do drop us an email at dyannbakes.com. We'd love to hear from you.
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