Philadelphia becomes New York!!!!

Actually I was refering to Philadelphia creamcheese and New York cheesecake, but I bet if you tell the President I turned Philadelphia into New York, he probably would believe it.
Over the weekend, I had to go to a friend’s party. I knew the party a week before. To coordinate with the baby shower cake, which uses one 8oz creamcheese for the frosting, I chose to buy the creamcheese in bulk, save some money and try to make the New York cheescake using the recipe from a good recipe publisher. A block of creamcheese is equal to six 8oz pack of cream cheese, most New York cheesecake call for 5 packs of cream cheese, so this combination works out for my need.
To most people, a block of creamcheese looks scary:



I have handle it often enought, it has became my prefer method of buying creamcheese since it’s way cheaper than individual package of creamcheese.
Anyway, making New York cheesecake is quite easy, the ingredient is simple, and it yield quite a generous amount of batter that almost fill to the top of my 3″ cheesecake pan. The cheesecake doesn’t expand after baking because I beat them in medium speed, which incorporate less air. The recipe calls to bake the cheesecake in 500F oven for 10 minutes, then drop to 200F and bake for 1.5 hour without open the oven door. The baking was done without using water bath, which is the major reason why I want to try this recipe.
The result looks very promising, when the cheesecake first came out of the oven, it looks just perfect, not too brown, very flat:



The recipe did say bake until the cheesecake register 150F. I didn’t want to poke a hole into the cheesecake to measure the temperature, so I took out my thermo gun, point at the cheesecake, and the center of the cake registered 145F, I thought that’s just the center surface of the cake, so the inside should be just right. I went ahead and let it cool on wire rack outside of the oven…. a major mistake!!! I mean….look!:



The center of the cake crack! The next time I will definately let the whole cake cool in the oven as I read that if you take cheesecake out of the oven to cool, sudden drop of environment temperature might cause the cheesecake to shink and crack. This is when happen sometimes when you feel too confident about your baking skill and ignore some of the theory and science behind baking, and trying to take shortcut.
New York cheesecake normally serve with strawberry sauce, I happen to have some in my freezer, mine is more like a glaze then sauce, but eventually, it works out:



I know, the glaze is too red, but the flavor is very good! The cheesecake itself is very eggy because of lots of egg yolk, the glaze definately help nuetralize it. The center of the cake is a bit underdone, sort of like pudding. The next time it definately need more cooking time and cool completely in the oven.

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