Carrot Cheesecake!

I love cheesecake, and it's one of those things you you can make without searching for a recipe or trying really hard, which makes it great for an impulsive dessert. It's also a really easy dessert to customize. This week I was craving carrot cake with cream cheese icing, but that would require a recipe and I'd get flour all over the place and really I was just too lazy for all that. Thus the carrot cheesecake was born.

Graham Cracker Crust

• Graham crackers (um.... I forgot to count. Let's say 12-ish)
• Cold, unsalted butter (yeah, failed to measure this one too. I'll call it 3 Tbsp. Ish.)
• 2 Tbsp. sugar. Or so.

Place all ingredients into a food processor and obliterate until it looks crusty. There should be enough butter so that it holds together when pressed, and enough grahams to cover the bottom of an 8-inch springform pan. You can't really mess this up, so just adjust as you go. Note that a lot of crust recipes require you to melt the butter first, but what happens when you add a liquid to a graham? You get mud. I dunno bout you, but I'm not a fan of mudcrust.

Press the crust into the bottom of your pan and bake at 350 for about 7 minutes. Set to cool while you do the rest.

Carrot Filling

• 2 cups shredded carrots (about 4 carrots worth)
• 1 cup apple juice
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 2-3 pieces candied ginger, minced (about 1Tbsp)
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 Tbsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp each fresh grated nutmeg and ground allspice
• 1/4 tsp ground clove
• Tiny pinch salt

Place all ingredients in a 1-quart pot and simmer over low heat for 10-15 minutes, or until all juice is absorbed/evaporated and carrots are no longer crunchy. If the liquid boils away before the carrots are done, add more 1/2 cup at a time. Adjust the spices to taste, then set aside to cool.

Cheesecake Base

• 2 packages (8 oz. each) cream cheese at room temperature
• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup toasted walnut pieces
• 1/2 cup toasted pecan pieces

 In a large bowl, blend the cream cheese until thoroughly soft. Add the eggs, sugar, vanilla and blend on low speed. Add the carrot mixture and the nuts and blend to combine. Pour the batter onto the crust then bake for about 35 minutes or until all but the center-most 2-inches is firm.

Note: contrary to many other theories going around, cracking is caused by overcooking. Since the cake cools from the outside in, and since it holds heat for a long time, cooking it until the middle is just underdone will allow the cake to coast to a perfect finish.

But then again if it does crack, just eat that one all yourself and make another one to show off to others :)

Sweet Potato Mousse with Espresso Chocolate Sauce

This week's FoodieFights is Battle Sweet Potato and Coffee. It's a tough battle for me, because while I love sweet potatoes, I hate coffee. In fact, before creating this recipe, I've never even made a cup of coffee before. So my challenge today wasn't so much how to combine sweet potatoes with coffee (I immediately had several ideas) but how to combine them into something that I would actually eat. After considering several ideas, I decided to go with a dessert. After all, most new coffee drinkers drown their coffee with sugar and cream, right?

Sweet Potato Mousse

• 1 sweet potato (about 8 oz), peeled and diced
• 2 oz. cream cheese
• 1/2 c. powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 1 cup heavy cream, very cold

Cook the sweet potato in salted boiling water, then drain well and chill. Once the potatoes are nice and cold, add the cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, and spices. Beat on very low speed until combined, then ramp up the speed and beat until smooth and slightly fluffy.

Next, beat the heavy cream until it attains a medium firmness. If you overbeat here, then in the next step you will make sweet potato butter. It actually sounds like that might be tasty, but it's not what we're going for. Fold in about a third of your whipped cream with you sweet potato to lighten it up, then throw the sweet potato back into the whipped cream. Fold well, then whip again at medium speed until it attains a nice mousse-y firmness. Chill in the fridge while you make the...

Espresso Chocolate Sauce

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 healthy pinch of salt
• 1 cup fresh hot espresso (or double-strength coffee)
• 1 tbsp coffee liqueur

In a small saucepan, whisk together the dry ingredients, then slowly whisk in the espresso and liqueur. I've found that if you whisk it into a paste then slowly add more liquid it keeps you from having chunks of undissolved bits of chocolate. Heat the mixture slowly. Boil for about a minute, then let cool. It should thicken as it cools, becoming the consistency of bottled chocolate syrup.


The Reveal

All you really need to serve this is a spoon for the mousse and a big bowl of sauce, but if you plan on serving this to someone instead of eating it all yourself, it's not hurt by a nice sprinkling of candied pecans:



The dessert as a whole is really quite a trip. You are immediately hit with the smokiness of the coffee, which I'm not supposed to like, but I'm surprised to find that I love it. Next comes the creaminess of the mousse with a delicate but definite hit of sweet potato, and it's rounded out with the deep, dark sweetness of chocolate.

Ice Cream Part I: Maple Pecan and Bacon

Last week's Foodie Fights was Battle Frozen Dessert! I did not get selected to participate, but it was enough to finally get me off my laurels and make some ice cream, something I've been wanting to do for a long time. So, after rewatching the Churn Baby Churn and Churn Baby Churn 2 episodes of Good Eats, I decided to set off and make Philadelphia style ice cream, (i.e. frozen cream and sugar) which seemed like the easiest type to attempt for my first... attempt.

But what kind? Well, I've always had a love affair with bacon, and lately I've been semi-successfully incorporating it into sweet desserts, so why not ice cream? Another combination I really love is pecans and bacon, and maple and pecans, and guess what? I just so happened to have in the fridge some fresh, B-grade maple syrup my brother's girlfriend made, so I figured it was destiny.

Maple Bacon and Pecan Ice Cream

• 4 cups (1 qt) half and half
• 2 cups (1 pt) heavy cream
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup (B-grade is better for this as it has a richer flavor and is less sweet; whatever you do, don't use maple flavored syrup.)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

 Slowly heat all ingredients except the vanilla to 170F (or if you don't have a thermometer, heat it until you see one single bubble), then cool slightly and add the vanilla. Place in an air-tight container and store in the refrigerator. You need it to at least get down to fridge temp, but it will be even better if you keep it overnight.

• 1 1/2 cups (6 oz) pecan pieces
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 3 Tbsp white sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 2 Tbsp maple syrup

Melt the butter over low heat. Just when it starts to brown add the pecans, stirring often. (This is when the professional chef flippy technique comes in handy; using a spoon just kinda lands nuts everywhere). Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the nuts are well toasted. Be careful as it's easy to burn them, and nobody likes burnin' their nuts! (Sorry, couldn't help myself).

Add the spices and sugar, stirring and/or flipping to evenly coat, then spoon in your maple syrup. Keep everything moving until you have a big sticky mass of pecans and yum, then spread out on parchment paper to cool.

• Bacon!

I used 7 pieces (3.5 oz? I have no idea) maple-cured bacon and it seemed to be the perfect ratio of bacon to non-bacon in the final product. Lay the bacon out on a foil-lined pan and heat slowly (300-ish) until the fat is rendered and it's nice and crispy. The particular brand of bacon I used was sweet but not salty, so I added a healthy pinch or two of salt before baking. Crumble into pecan-sized pieces, then place the bacon and pecans in plastic bags to await ice cream day.

Ice cream day!

Dump your ice cream base into your favorite ice cream maker. Mine's pretty big sized, so if you only have a 1 qt machine you may have to do it in two batches. After about half the time (15 minutes for me) add the pecans and bacon. When it's soft serve consistency (or when your machine (if electric) or slave (if manual) starts making whining noises), quickly (if you're making ice cream it's probably hot outside!) scoop into a freezer-safe container and freeze for a couple hours. Then the best part: eat it!

After scarfing down way too much of this stuff, I found out that it's even better (if you can believe it) covered in chocolate syup. And I don't generally like chocolate syrup.

Enjoy!

After thoughts

 There is one little detail I didn't mention above. When I was heating my milk, it started to look like overcooked cheese soup. Oh noes! Brown sugar (and possibly maple syrup) are pretty acidic, and acids denature milk proteins, causing milk to look like overcooked cheese soup. I did some research on the subject (even finding a nifty food science book on the internet), but don't really know how to avoid this problem. The only thing I found was perhaps if you heat the milk before you add the sugar, the rate of curdling should slow down. But I haven't tried it yet. The final product turned out more than excellent, so it ended up not being a problem. Guess I'll just have to make several more batches and experiment!

Leftovers: Pineapple, Chorizo, Coconut Milk

So what do you do when you have extra ingredients from recipes? You make more recipes! These aren't especially creative, but I did actually make them and they were all kinds of tastey.

Chorizo Tacos

• 1 link of chorizo
• 1-inch slice of onion
• 1/2-inch slice of pineapple
• 2 corn tortillas
• Cilantro, lime, and chipotle flavored Tabasco sauce for garnish

This is a great, quick meal for one, using leftovers from Tacos al Pastor a la Ohio (It's what I had for lunch, in fact). Keep the pineapple core in tact for now, and grill the chorizo, onion, and pineapple. (I like to stick a toothpick through the onion to keep them from falling apart.) Chop up into bite-sized pieces, place on the tortillas, garnish, and enjoy.

Coconut Pudding

• 2 c. coconut milk 
• 2 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 tsp vanilla

In a small bowl, whip the egg yolks until smooth. Then in a 1-quart saucepan over low heat, stir the milk, cornstarch and sugar until the mixture starts to bubble and thicken. It may thicken unevenly, so you may want to use a whisk to keep it from being lumpy. Add a whisk-full of hot milk mixture to the eggs and blend. Continue adding the milk to the eggs until you can feel the heat through the bowl. Next, pour the eggs into the milk and continue stirring over low heat until blended and smooth. Take off of heat and stir in the vanilla.

You can stick this in the fridge and wait until it cools down... but I couldn't wait that long and just ate it warm.

The beauty of this recipe is that it's easily divisible by 4 and you can base the measurements off of how much leftover coconut milk you have left. I used 1/4 can earlier today to make this great recipe from TheFoodInMyBeard, so I reduced everything by 1/4. And I didn't have to get out the calculator!