Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Key Lime Pie Cheesecak

Yeah, I know, it looks like almost every other cheesecake I've ever made.  Its yellow-ish, has a huge flux-capacitor-shaped-crack in the middle, and it is slightly sunken in the middle.  But ya know what is different about it?  It's a freakin key lime pie stuffed inside a cheesecake, metaphorically speaking!  


This was quite a difficult process.  Try and stay with me here and I will describe exactly how I made it. I started out with 12 graham crackers and beat the ever livin crap outta them!  Once they submitted and became little bitty crumbs at the bottom of the jar(right now my sister is saying "eat 'em up eat 'em up, chomp chomp chomp), I combined them with 2Tbsp of sugar and 1tsp salt then mixed in a stick of butter.  That's right a full stick, this is baking Paula Deen style.  That gets all squished into the bottom of the springform pan to make the crust.  Next comes the cheesecake part.  3-2-1 If you've read my blog you know what that is, if not click the link to see my recipe, it's so easy you'll want to make one yourself tonight, but then you will read the part about it having to refrigerate for several hours and you will change your mind and decide to have some ice cream instead.  You know, they say ice cream sales are always up when it's the coldest. 

To turn my original 3-2-1 recipe into a key lime pie cheesecake it requires key limes.  Duh!  I decided I would need to squeeze some juice into the batter to give it a good lime flavor, and then figured some zest would really kick it up a notch. 
I squeezed and squeezed until I got 4-5 Tbsp of juice and dumped it in.  Then I set out to start zesting.  My plan was to add about 4 Tbsp of zest......do you know how many freakin limes you have to zest to get that much???????  Yeah, me neither!!!!!!!!   I gave up after about 5.  My hand hurt like it hasn't hurt since I was in school having to write...you remember, before we all had laptops!  

The zest got added to the batter and mixed in well.  
I could make up some great reason like "I really wanted to balance the graham cracker crust well with the creamy cheesecake, so I only put a thin layer"  but I really don't know why I chose to do it that way.  I have no good explanation, hell I'm doing good to remember why I turned on my computer 15 minutes ago, I baked that cheesecake 5 days ago.  Who knows why I only put that small amount, but I'm glad I did.  It worked out perfectly.  The crust is super thick and the cheesecake equally thin which really does create a nice balance and the lime flavor really shines through.  It is an amazing cheesecake.  My wife had all her "mommy" friends over tonight and served this, they all totally loved it.  And I had 2 slices tonight, which is a big deal because I rarely even eat a whole slice.  I usually eat enough to determine how I like it and what I need to fix.






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