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There are some people at work that have repeatedly proven to make my job easier. Sometimes this has been guiding me through a paperwork thicket and other times it’s just been keeping me abreast of changes coming down the pike that would influence how I do my job. These people receive special visits from me on cheesecake days and today I made my way downstairs with two pieces of chocolate-glazed cheesecake and dropped one off at the mailroom. My next target was in a cubicle farm downstairs and as I approached her desk her boss popped over to talk to her. I quickly dodged down another row not wanting him to catch me dropping off cheesecake. Why? To avoid this:

Him: What’s the cheesecake for?
Me: To thank her.
Him: For what?
Me: I did something crazy dangerous in the lab and rather than writing me up for it she helped hold the ladder while I changed the lightbulb one-handed over the mixer without safety glasses on.

I did a few circles around area and rechecked every few minutes to see if he had gone. The cube dwellers started to get suspicious so I had to walk around another wing. Finally he left and I dropped off the cheesecake. She was grateful and I later checked my pedometer logs to find that I had walked 2/3rds of a mile to avoid her boss.

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Coworker: Terry, I have an admission to make.
Me: Yes?
Coworker: I tried your cheesecake yesterday and felt guilty after a bite so I threw it out.
Me: That’s ok.
Coworker: I’m not done yet.
Me: Oh.
Coworker: It was really good, so I took it back out again, and had some.
Me: Was your trashcan at least clean?
Coworker: Yes, but I’m still not done. I did that four more times.

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The secret to a cheesecake is that it’s not a cake.  The leavening agent is strictly egg rather than baking soda, baking powder, or yeast, and to get a smooth top one must coast over the finish line rather than dashing over it.  I put the cake into a roasting dish partly filled with boiling water and cooked the cheesecake with the residual heat of the oven coasting down from a few hundred degrees.  The cake finished and had a gorgeous uncracked top.

Bad Part: I had no one to share this with.
Good Part: I had no one to share this with.

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I was called mad for making a square cheesecake but after watching a cake cutting pattern best described as cubist I decided on a shape less likely to succumb to the surgeon-during-an-earthquake style that’s currently used by my coworkers.  Square baking is tricky, as there’s the pointy bits that’ll finish first but with temperature control this can be eliminated.

Or at least I thought it could.  The middle cooked but also kinda collapsed as sometimes happens with custards.  I hid my mistake with a pool of ganache topped with fudge.  I got the comfort of knowing that an 8×8 could server 16 people with 2″x2″ pieces and they got… fudge.

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I plot desserts along three axes: ease of preparation, joy of consumption, and appearance.  I focus heavily on the ratio of joy of consumption to ease of preparation as that maximizes the brownie points I receive from my coworkers.  For instance, truffles are fantastically easy to prepare and quite tasty but ugly.  A ganache coating increases appearance but at the cost of difficulty.  Anything with a homemade crust is low on prep ease and medium in consumption so I generally don’t bother.

Cheesecake with a topping or filling sits at the apex of the three, being difficult to prepare well, pretty, and makes one feel like one’s tongue were being hugged.  The difficulty comes from handling as cheesecakes will crumble and crack if you look at them funny.  Additionally, they involve making a separate crust and blank-baking it and require a setting period that alternates between hot and cold and can take in excess of six hours.  So, what if I simply sacrificed appearance and slashed out much of the coddling?  I was going to find out.

One tactic to ensure even heating is to bake the cake in a hot water bath.  F that.  Another is to leave the oven door open a crack while leaving the oven at a low temperature for six hours.  F that as well.  I went for the much simpler “remove it from the oven and put it in the fridge” tactic and was rightly punished.  What emerged looked like the lid of a mason jar.  The cake had rose jack-straight about 3/4″ above the rim of the pan and then caved in like someone had put a belt around it only to return to its original width before flattening to a plateau evoking the cracked surface of a dessicated flood plain.  Hm…

Only in one other case had I refused to serve something because it looked hideous and that was because I literally dropped it.  I think my solution was somewhat clever: I popped the cheesecake in the freezer, firmed it up a bit, sawed the top off and glazed the remaining cake with cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate.  The best part was having an excuse to have a breakfast consisting of the top of  a cheesecake.