A little Sunday afternoon baking with the princess and the newborn....interesting

 I always like to bake on Sundays. Not sure why, but for some reason it just feels right. Some of my best creations have been birthed out of the stillness of a Sunday afternoon. Though, there's not much stillness anytime around here these days with an 18 month-old little diva running around the house and a 4 day old newborn laying around alternating between screaming, pooping, and sleeping all hours of the day and night...ya know, they just don't do a whole lot for a while! They kinda just lay there and poop a lot. But nobody ever cares. Everybody just keeps telling them how precious they are while wiping the poop off their armpits and toes...yeah, that's right, I said armpits and toes. If you've never experienced the complete and udder joy (haha, get it?) of having a child of your own, you might not believe that they can poop from head to toe, but believe me buddy, they can.

This picture below is of our oldest, and as you can see there was poop everywhere...she had a knack for storing it up for a couple of days and then hitting you with it all at once. It was scary...let me tell you!  As a Marine door gunner on a helicopter who fearlessly flew all over Iraq during our "not-a-war", this was scary. My wife is so brave though...she charged in without the slightest bit of hesitation, with nothing more than some wipey's.

So enough about poop, let's talk about cheesecake. As I mentioned, Sunday afternoons are always a great time to do some baking, and today was no different. I decided to make a cheesecake, so I asked the mom-in-law (totally not a nag, I'm such a lucky guy) what she thought sounded good and she shouted out "chocolate chip". So I got to work making a chocolate chip cheesecake, but while I was rummaging through the pantry the coconut caught my eye...so I threw half the bag of that in too.

If you're one of the faithful followers of my blog, then you will have rightfully assumed I used my 3-2-1 recipe 

to make my cheesecake. It's so simple and delicious why change it? Well, I mean, change it to make it into the flavor of the day, but why go through all the trouble of adding thirteen thousand ingredients to a cheesecake when just three gets the job done amazingly? However, I have to admit the supposed Cheesecake Factory recipe I made once was quite tasty. It had a fluffiness that mine seems to be lacking as I recall, but it's ingredient intensive! 

For today's recipe, I made my 3-2-1 recipe and added a cup of chocolate chips and a cup of coconut...oh man as I'm sitting here typing this it just dawned on me that I forgot to put in the tsp of vanilla that I usually add. Ooops. We shall see how it tastes. I'm sure it will be alright.

 I prepared it following the normal routine but this time I tried something different. I remembered a technique the lady at Bumdoodlers who made our wedding cake told me about. She said she preheats the oven to like 500 degrees, then throws in the cheesecake and immediately drops the temperature to 350. So, I gave it a shot. I preheated to 500, threw the cake in then turned the temperature knob to 350 for 30 minutes, then dropped it to 250 for the remaining 30 minutes. Once the hour was up, I turned the oven off but left the cake in there. After it had cooled for probably half an hour I opened the door on the oven and left it in there. I finally pulled the cake out and set it on the table about 2 hours or so after it was done baking. I also decided to throw in a casserole dish full of warm water on the rack below it as an attempt to keep it from cracking and collapsing.

And BAM, it worked! Still ugly, but gettin better!