Ok, I definitely didn’t think through the whole “Mission: Use Egg Nog” plan, because I am now the proud owner of not one, not two, but THREE eggnog cheesecakes & I don’t know what to do with any of them. (I certainly wasn’t planning on EATING them!)
So Yoshi was nice enough to take me to Bed, Bath, & Beyond where I got a set of 3 springform pans for $9.99 and a set of 3 cookie sheets also for $9.99. Then we went to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients I was missing for the cheesecake (cream cheese, nutmeg, butter, rum, etc.). Yoshi and I should never go to the grocery store when we’re hungry because when we were all said and done, we had spent $82 at Ralph’s.
$100 in one night, nice… Mind you, the whole point of this was not to waste two cartons of eggnog, which I estimate cost us no more than $5.
Anyway, once I decided I was on this mission, I had to finish, so Yoshi was brave enough to help me in the kitchen, where I had decided to make 3 cheesecakes at once (I did have THREE new pans, afterall!). I (mostly) followed this recipe I found at allrecipes.com.
Making the crusts was pretty easy because instead of crushing graham crackers myself, I had purchased a box of pre-crumbed crumbs that were ready-to-use. Since I didn’t pay attention to the box the 3 springform pans came in, I soon came upon glitch #1. The pans were not all 9″ pans (as I had assumed), they came in 8.5″, 9.5″, and 10″ sizes. I would have to tweak the quantities of the ingredients to adjust for the larger and smaller sized pans. No biggie.
Then came the fun; making the cheesecake itself. This proved to be tougher than I thought it would be because of two main reasons:
1) I don’t have any large mixing bowls.
2) I evidently can’t follow directions.
Since I don’t have a food processor, I opted to cream the cream cheese with a small hand mixer. You can guess how messy this task is if your mixing bowl isn’t big enough.
Also, I couldn’t figure out why my cream cheese wasn’t creaming properly. Well, it would’ve helped if I’d actually followed the directions and NOT put all the ingredients into the bowl at once. Yoshi helped by measuring out some of the ingredients because, well, I tend to not measure things… comes from learning to cook “Chinese-style” (I am not afraid to admit that the words, “What?! Recipe? I don’t need no stinkin’ recipe! And I don’t need to measure anything either!” have actually come out of my mouth). The first batch of cream cheese was clumpy, runny and just hadn’t mixed well with everything else. Oh well. I dumped it into the largest (10″) pan, the one I had already kind of messed up since I had kind of burnt the crust a little anyway.
Cheesecake #2 was only slightly more successful for the first. I had realized that I hadn’t properly mixed the cream cheese the first time, so I followed the directions exactly {well, except for the food processor part} and I “combine[d] cream cheese, sugar, flour and eggnog; process[ed] until smooth.” {Oh, and except for the “prcoess until smooth” part, because batch #2 was also clumpy (although significantly less clumpy than batch #1, but this was mostly due to the fact that Yoshi was patient enough to stand there with the hand mixer for a LONG time)}. That one went into the smallest pan.
For Cheesecake #3, I decided to forego mixing the eggnog in with the cream cheese until later. I mixed all the dry ingredients with the cream cheese and hand mixed it until it was smooth. {Except that in addition to not having any mixing bowls, I also don’t have any mixing spoons.} So I decided to mix “Asian-style!” and used a pair of giant chopsticks (the kind you use for cooking) and the plastic shamoji (rice scooper) instead. This was by far the most successful attempt. I was able to use the hand mixer after that to add in the rest of the ingredients and finally start baking.
Anyway, the baking process was pretty smooth {except for the fact that I forgot to start the timer when I started baking}. After a while, I was kind of wondering why my timer hadn’t made its intermittent beeps to let me know the timer was on. So then I had to kind of guesstimate how long to keep the cheesecakes in the oven. They came out of the oven eventlessly and sat on cooling racks overnight until this morning.
Then I realized I didn’t know what to do with them. I would put them in the fridge/freezer, but I don’t have an appropriate container to put them in (so they don’t get smashed). Luckily, it is really chilly in our house right now, so they are OK sitting in the other room for now.
So anyway, I am still trying to figure out “now what” about the cheesecakes, but since I only used about 3/4ths for the first carton of eggnog, I am going to attempt a batch (or however-many) of eggnog cookies later tonight. Hopefully those will be easier to store. {Wish me luck.}
(Cut & paste of the eggnog cheesecake recipe is below)
Continue reading ‘Now what?’
Like this:
Like Loading...
Well, we are sitting in a gorgeous hotel room in Silicon Valley this New Year’s Eve, debating if we should ring in 2005 downstairs at the bar, or if we just want to hang out in the room. 
Nonetheless, I’m going to get offline now and spend the last few minutes of 2004 offline (heaven knows I spent most of the past year ONLINE!). Here’s a little Happy New Year picture from me to you. And, I even got a little Happy New Year cameo from Yoshi, who is holding the Happy New Year hat from behind the mountain of pillows on our bed. 
Tonight we’re going to see our friends at 
Recent Comments