More cheesecake... lots more

My mom and I both like to cook and bake. It's something she passed on to me when I was about 5, and I've been doing it ever since. We both do a lot of baking over the holidays. A group of people at her church were going to have a Christmas dinner with somewhere around 60 people. They asked my mom to cater the event since they had all had her cooking during various parties that she would cook for. My mom decided to do all of the cooking for the dinner and she asked me to do the dessert. We had to figure out what to make. The lady in charge wasn't a lot of help. She wanted something with chocolate, but didn't want cake and didn't want my cake balls either. We decided we would offer the chocolate covered cheesecake.



Cheesecakes take a while to make. Since I have a full time job that doesn't involve any type of cooking, I'm limited to making things in the evenings when I get home from work. In the case of cheesecakes, you have to get the ingredients to room temperature, mix them, make and bake the crust, fill the cheesecake pan, put the pan in a water bath and bake the cheesecake. Then you have to let it cool very slowly in the oven and take it out to let it finish cooling before you can put it in the fridge to set completely. Since I was covering them with chocolate ganache, I couldn't pour on the chocolate until the cheesecake was cool. That usually meant waiting until the next day to coat the one I made the night before.

I started baking on Monday for the Saturday event, because I could only make one a night. I also only have one spring-form pan large enough for the recipe I was using. It makes a 10" cheesecake that's almost 3 inches tall.

The other problem I had was with portions. I didn't want them to randomly cut the cheesecake into pieces, because there was no guarantee that they would cut them equally and that the cheesecakes would go far enough. Plus, people usually make a mess when cutting cheesecakes, because they don't want to take the time to do it right. To ensure that the portions were the same size, there were enough, and they would look good after being cut and served, I had to figure out a way to do prepare them for serving. First, I had to figure out the equal portions bit. To do that, I needed the cheesecakes to be cut into 18 pieces each. If I wanted 12, that would be easy. Make a cut vertical and horizontal across the middle and then start dividing quadrants. For what I was doing, I needed math.



I created a pie chart in MS Excel and printed it out as large as I could. Then I applied that to a piece of card stock to give it some structure. I now had my template for the exact number of pieces. I didn't want to just lay it on the chocolate, because it would mess up the finish, so I inserted needles into the center and at between each wedge of the template. Then, when I pressed the template down on the cheesecake, it simply put little dots where I needed to cut. Next, I had to have a clean cut so these would be presentable. This was actually made easier by the chocolate.



To get the clean cuts, I boiled some water in a large container and placed my longest bread knife in the water. In doing so, the knife would pass through the chocolate and the top part of the cheesecake cleanly. Then, as I would pull the knife straight back out of the cheesecake, I would clean the knife and put it back in the water for the next cut. The result was a beautifully clean sliced cheesecake. Now I just had to do it with three more cheesecakes.

The cheesecakes were a hit at the event, as was the rest of the food. When asked about the cheesecakes later, I'm told that people's eyes would glaze over when talking about it because they thought the cheesecakes were so good. I can't argue with that sort of praise. I love the recipe too.