Cheesecake again!! :)

I seem to bake a lot of cheesecakes... but they never seem to be able to taste as nice as those yummy ones I get to eat in cafes. Maybe it is time to go for classes or do more research.

Anyway, this time round I made a variation of the normal cheesecake for my sister's birthday.

Yesh... Blueberry Cheesecake... She has been bugging me for months or years. This recipe was taken from the 'Essentials of Baking' by Williams-Sonoma. What I love about this is the hazelnut base. But what I dislike about it is the taste of the almond essence. I wish I had followed my heart and not put it in instead. Being someone who dislikes the taste of almond, the taste of the almond essence was too overwhelming. I couldn't even taste the cheese. Eeks.... But I love the crust... :) My tasters felt the cake was quite okay. If I am going to attempt it again, I will definitely leave the almond essence out!

The outlook of the cake wasn't perfect with the snow powder not evenly distributed due to the lack of proper equipments :P But I love it! Simple and nice. I wanted to deco it with writings on a white choco board but somehow the white choco did not melt nicely.. not sure what went wrong... wasted my $5 worth of white choco. But I really have been having problems melting my choco recently... seriously need to find out what is wrong.

~2 Chefs.8 Hours.4 Bakes~

A weekday afternoon spent baking with Qin on 6 Sept 2010. Haha... not a very motivated baking day though... the rainy weather makes me feel lazy and I left most of the baking work done by Qin. I did the washing up though. This seems to be what happens when friends come over to bake at my place. I do less of the baking and more of the washing up.

So our first bake of the day (if I rem correctly):

The taste of the cupcake was good since it has nutella... but it was overbaked. :P Also, the texture was heavy.

Next up are these Nestum Cookies which you see below:

Hmm... they taste okay but I wouldn't attempt it for another time. Using nestum as the ingredients was an interesting idea though. :)

Our 3rd bake: Cheese Logs

It was fun piping the dough into wordings and shapes but I did not like the taste of the 'cookies' when they were cooled. Too saltish...

And our final bake of the day was the Marble Cheesecake:

This is my 2nd attempt baking this. The texture is pretty similar to my first attempt, maybe a little softer and soggy. Need some improvements and I am keen to master it.

This time round I made the chocolate sponge base and it tastes even better. I am so proud of the springy chocolate sponge cake which you see on the left... tastes a little weird on its own but tastes great as the cheesecake base... :) Most importantly, it is springy! I can press it down and it will return to its original form immediately! Worth experimenting it again.

This cheesecake is well-liked by my family but apparently not so well-liked by Qin's family. Shall let my friends try it the next time and see their response.

So this ends off my baking day with Qin. 4 bakes in 8 hours by 2 efficient chefs... Haha... :P