Wednesday, September 22, 2010

[DIY] how to bake a light cheese cake

Was really tied up with work and processing the semester exam.Finally I found some FREE time to blog about stuffs I have done over the weeks!

The following ingredients called for 2 cakes.

250g Cream Cheese (I used Philadelphia,you can use any type of cream cheese of your choice ).
100g Butter
Leave both above at room temperature.
8eggs , yolk and white separate.
100g sugar (can be reduced to 80g if you are watching the sugar intake)
2 Tbsp (Table spoon) corn flour
2 Tbsp flour
0.5 serving of mango yogurt
150ml of whipping cream (chilled)
1tsp (tea spoon) of vanilla essence

This baking of cheese cake called for the hot water bath treatment (to be elaborated later). I did wrapped some foil on my spring foam pan (the baking tin with detachable base) to prevent water from seeping in.
Sieve the powder ingredient.
Beat butter and cream cheese with the mixer at medium speed or high speed if you are impatient like me!haha
Beat with a mixer untill light and fluffy. How to determine the mixture is fluffy? Where the mixture is beaten until it have risen AKA volume increases, that is about time to stop the mixer. If you are using a manual one, this is a good exercise to burn off the calorie... (which you going to consume later anyway...hahahaha)


Beat in the egg yolk 1 by 1.
Add in vanilla essence
Sieve in (for the 2nd time) the powder in batches and stir with a spatula. Doing for some body i Love, so I did put in extra effort. Otherwise.....
Make sure there are no granules of powder in the mixture. This will affect the texture of the cake


Turn On the mixer, add in yogurt to batter
Then add in whipping cream (chilled) to batter
 This is how the batter going to look like after all the ingredients are mixed. We are not done yet. Still have the most important step, making the meringue.

In the mean time, lets go and heat up the oven at 170deg C with a hot water bath. Prepare a pan in the oven, add in hot water until 4/5 or 3/4 filled. Do not fill to the brim, It will overflow and caused scalding. The cake tin is going to take a bath in the pan in a little while. My oven is the those that comes with a fan, the fan is good when roasting. Baking wise, conventional oven is good.
Meringue time.
Make sure your mixer, bowl and utensils are free from dirt, water and grease. Must be very very clean and dry thoroughly.
The egg white must be free from egg yolk too. TURN On the mixer at HIGH SPEED
Add in the sugar in batches

Beat the mixture until semi liquid form. This is the tricky step. In between mixing, turn off the mixer then lift up the mixer and observe the runny egg white. If it is still very liquid form, continue to beat. If it still flow down from the mixer and form a perk, that is the texture we want. If the egg white is beaten until set,  i.e. you can practically overturned the container with the white sponge in it over and it will not fall by force of gravity. This is the no no.

This takes a couple of practices to get the perfect meringue. I tried to master it, but it is really a costly experiment. Lab rats are really hard to come by to eat my experiment! hahahaha

Stir in the egg white mixture in batches to the batter.
My mum trained me (never inspired to be a ) to stir in such a way that, it forms an numerical eight. She said this will fold maximum amount of air into the cake.

Pour the batter into the cake tin, and off it goes into the oven into the hot bath.
Bake for 40minutes.

My mum's technique again.....
while(cake!=ready){
Insert a LONG bamboo skewer into the cake,
      If the skewer comes out clean,
               then cake is ready.
     else
               continue with another 10 minutes.
}

I got carried away chatting on MSN with her and forgot to observe the time.........Then i sense a burnt smell......