Remembering Aunt Belle: Apple Cheesecake

This is an odd Thanksgiving. It'll be the first without Aunt Belle (technically my mom's aunt), who passed away last week at the age of 94. If you know me, you're probably already aware that she was a legend and had a larger-than-life presence in so many ways. Most relevant to this online venue, however, is her love for baking.

For as long as I can remember (and right up until just a few months ago), Aunt Belle was in charge of desserts for family gatherings: Thanksgiving, Passover seders, other holidays -- you name it. Sometimes she made the classics: macaroons, rugelach, cheesecake, sponge cake, etc.. Sometimes she ventured into new territory. She never made fewer than 3 or 4 options, however.

My job (ok, along with just about everybody else in the family; but she made me _feel_ like it was my job alone) was to taste each and every one, and let her know what I thought. This was slightly tricky. On the one hand, she very clearly wanted to be told that they were all delicious. She also told us this herself. On the other hand, though, I think she was genuinely interested in feedback on recipes she hadn't tried before.

A long discussion ensued at the "kids table" during Thanksgiving a few years ago about how to best let her know that we didn't really care for the "millionaire's pie" (yeah, i don't know either) she had made as an experiment. As I recall, we agreed (after much deliberation) to tell her that it was delicious, but maybe not as delicious as some other things she'd made that we'd rather have again.

In honor of Aunt Belle, I'm currently in the midst of making her apple cheesecake. It has all the makings of a typical Aunt Belle recipe. It's very simple to make (it can mostly be done in the food processor; she rarely made anything requiring a rolling pin, and once told me she had never used yeast). It uses great ingredients (little can go wrong when mixing fresh fruit, cream cheese and sugar). And it's really, really, really good.

For your holiday baking pleasure, I present the recipe for this cake. Be warned that it's not at all a traditional cheesecake -- it has a shortbread-like crust, and the cream cheese layer is very thin. It's also pretty easy to modify slightly -- I've made it with ginger instead of cinnamon; the crust would be great with a ground vanilla bean; etc.


Apple Cheesecake

Apple Topping:
4 cups sliced apples
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 stick butter, sliced
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Filling:
1 8 oz pkg cream cheese
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract


1. Pre-heat oven to 450.

2. Combine apples, sugar and cinnamon. Let sit in bowl.

3. Combine crust ingredients in food processor (or use pastry blender). Pulse to combine. Press into bottom of 10" springform pan.

4. Combine filling ingredients in food processor with metal blade. Let run for a few minutes to blend completely and beat the egg thoroughly.

5. Pour filling over crust, top with apples; bake for 10 min @ 450, then 25 min @ 400.

A Few of My Favorite...

So far this blog has been mostly about stuff I've made, with an emphasis on ingredients and flavor combinations. I've shown you tweaks I've made to other people's recipes, and different ways of combining component elements (taffy and Methocel puffs, e.g.).

That's all well and good, but I confess that sometimes it's fun just to make a recipe exactly as it's presented by somebody else. No tweaks. No novelty. Just a replication of something somebody else decided was good enough to publish. I did a fair bit of that sort of baking this weekend.

And this experience provides me with the first of (what will hopefully be) several opportunities to tell you about my favorite cookbooks.

This weekend, I made a couple recipes from Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert. In contrast to the fairly bold and sometimes exotic flavors I've been telling you about over the past few weeks, this book is all about subtle. Medrich divides her book into categories that reflect different classes of ingredients (milk, grains, sugar/sweeteners, fruit, etc.). In each category, she provides recipes that draw on the unique properties of those ingredients to provide flavor. Where simple staples like flour or sugar are just the base for other flavors in most desserts, Medrich gives them center stage.

What happens, for example, when you substitute buckwheat flour and cornmeal into scones? Crunchiness and a rich, nutty flavor, it turns out. What about using different sugars (turbinado, muscovado, piloncillo, etc.)? Rich sweetness in all sorts of ways. This book is great not just for its recipes, but (like any good cookbook, I think) because thumbing through it on the couch on a rainy afternoon is an educational experience. Medrich explains the ingredients and the effect they have on recipes, and details why she has chosen a particular grain or sweetener. She also talks about her experiments with them.

This morning I made her ginger snap recipe, which is one of my favorites from this book. They derive their spicy and intense ginger flavor from ground ginger, grated fresh ginger, and diced candied ginger. The intensity is rounded out with a bit of cinnamon and allspice; and counterbalanced with rich sweetness from molasses, white sugar, brown sugar, and a turbinado sugar coating. Delicious. And super quick to make.

When I had some friends over for tea yesterday, I made her buckwheat and cornmeal scones with walnuts. I improvised a little bit by adding some chopped white chocolate (1 c) and lemon zest (1 lemon). Delightful, and also very easy.

Back to more experiments next weekend, probably. Have a good week!

Cardamom Puffs with Pear Taffy Filling

Given the name of the blog, it seemed odd to have not posted anything involving pears. Problem solved.

This experiment was born from a confluence of two factors. First, I wanted to play more with stuff on my shelf full o' food chemistry fun. Second, I really like the tastes of pear and cardamom together. This was an attempt to do that, but as I'll note below it wasn't completely successful. More on that later. First a description of technique.

You may be wondering what a 'puff' is. The basic idea here is borrowed directly from Grant Achatz at Alinea. Take an intensely flavored liquid (in this case a cardamom syrup), blend it with Methocel-F50 (a gelling agent derived from plant cellulose and available from Dow Chemical) to form a foam, and then dehydrate the foam to form a meringue-like 'puff.'

To make these cardamom puffs, I first made a cardamom syrup with 10-15 green cardamom pods, 2 cups of water, and a cup of sugar. I let it steep for about two hours after bringing to a boil and dissolving the sugar. Then I took 210g of syrup and blended it with 5g of Methocel-F50 in the blender. I then transferred it to the stand mixer, and whipped it at high speed with the whisk for about 10 minutes. Once it resembled whipped cream or meringue, I put it in a Ziploc, and piped it onto acetate sheets sprayed with cooking spray. I then put these in the dehydrator for about 5 hours at 150 degrees F.

The idea was for the cardamom puffs to be filled with pear taffy, which meant I also needed some pear taffy. For this I turned to Achatz again, following his recipe for red pepper taffy. This involved mixing pear juice (from fresh pears via juice extractor), sugar, liquid glucose, isomalt, corn starch, and salt. These were cooked together to 235 degrees, then mixed with a bit of butter, and cooled on a Silpat.


Next I hollowed out the puffs and filled them with the taffy (see photo above).

The taffy came out nicely. It's very smooth and tastes clearly of pear. The puffs are not as good. They're sweet and sort of a cool way to present the taffy, but the cardamom flavor just isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. Not sure if I could help this with some more cardamom, more steeping, or if maybe it's just too subtle a flavor.