Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake

Okay, so I should have posted this before Shavuos, but I just didn’t get to it. Bookmark this for next Shavuoth: super creamy cheesecake topped with soft caramel sauce and shards of milk chocolate. Kind of like a rolo crossed with cheesecake.

The basis for this was my Turtle Cheesecake, which is the same, but also has chopped pecans mixed into the caramel sauce and has a chocolate glaze instead of chopped chocolate. The chopped chocolate is easier to prepare than the chocolate glaze and is much, much easier to cut through when serving the cheesecake. I explain how to make home-made caramel sauce, but you could just buy caramel sauce or dulce de leche for the topping.

Cookbook Review: Dairy Made Easy & “180 Cal (or Less!) Cheesecake” Ramekins

Disclosure: Artscroll provided me with a copy of this book to review. Opinions are my own.

Leah Schapira and Victoria Dwek have released another book in their “made easy” series in time for Shavuoth. Like the earlier books in this series, Dairy Made Easy is a slim book, very attractively designed. The target audience for this book seems to be cooks who already have plenty of comprehensive, basic cookbooks and are looking to freshen up their dairy menus with recipes that are creative but not too much of a patchke.

The recipes in Dairy Made Easy are clearly explained and reasonably do-able for most cooks.  While most of them look fairly easy to make, not all of them are dead simple. Recipes that sound delicious but a little involved: Arancini (deep-fried cheese-stuffed rice balls), chocolate croissants, and cheese buns/babka.

This being a dairy cookbook, the recipes feature lots of butter, cream and cheese. Most don’t have over-the-top amounts, but some do. The Three Cheese Quiche has a pint of sour cream and almost two sticks of butter in the crust and over 2 1/2 lbs. of cheese in the filling. The Cajun Creamy Pasta, the Penne a la Vodka, the Pesto Cream Sauce and the Alfredo sauce all use about a pint of heavy cream.

The authors do include a “Make it Light” page that lists the lighter recipes in the book and provides tips for lightening up some of the richer recipes. A sidebar explains how to use Greek yogurt as a substitute for higher fat ingredients like cream cheese or sour cream. (Throughout the book, the authors suggest using a particular brand of Greek yogurt and another brand of hard cheese.) There is also a “Make it Pareve” page.

Another thing to bear in mind: the book emphasizes pasta and bread, not whole grains and legumes. The main dishes in this book are primarily divided between the chapters “Pizza,” “Pasta,” and “Soups, Salads & Sandwiches.”  There are ten pasta dishes, five pizza/calzone recipes and four sandwich recipes. Besides these bread or pasta main dishes, there is one fish recipe, one quiche recipe and one frittata recipe.

All that being said, the bottom line with any cookbook is whether or not the recipes are appealing and actually work. On this count, the authors definitely deliver. I have liked everything that I have made from this book and there are a number of other recipes I want to try. Here is what I have already made from this book:

Almost Fat Free Cheesecake

What would you say to cheesecake that is about 200 calories per (4.5 ounce) serving? Pretty good right? I tried making my ultra light cheesecake with only fat-free yogurt cheese, sugar, eggs, lemon and vanilla, and it came out delicious. I forgot to add the flour and accidentally cut the amount of sugar in half, which ended up not mattering much, so I saved some calories there, too.

I dusted the sides of the baking pan with some crushed Italian lady finger cookies (the crisp kind you use for tiramisu). You can skip the crushed cookies, but it doesn’t add much in the way of calories (you need only 4-5 cookies) and it gives the impression that there is a crust of some kind without the heavy calorie load of a graham cracker crust. The cookie crumbs also add a little extra sweetness to what is otherwise a very lightly sweetened cheesecake.

Here is how I figure the calories:

24 ounces yogurt cheese made from a 32 ounce container of Greek yogurt: 560 calories
3.75 ounces sugar: 384 calories
4 eggs: 280 calories (about 320 calories for extra-large eggs)
5 Italian ladyfinger cookies: 110 calories

Total calories : 1,334, which yields 8 servings, each about 4.5 ounces, at 167 calories per serving. The fat should be mostly from the egg yolks, which comes to 2.5 grams per serving.

Wordless Wednesday: Too Good For Words Turtle Cheesecake

Since you need some words to make this:

New York Style Cheesecake

One of my favorite cheesecakes was one served at a long gone kosher dairy restaurant in NYC. It was so soft and light I was sure that the recipe involved whipped egg whites. All other cheesecakes seemed unbearably leaden in comparison.

I never made anything close until I made Nick Malgieri’s Sour Cream Cheecake. The lightness does not come from whipped egg whites, but from a large amount of sour cream, which gives the cheesecake a super soft texture and a delightful tang.

Ultra Light Cheesecake

Made from low fat vanilla yogurt and reduced fat sour cream, this cheesecake has a very delicate texture: light and airy, like a souffle or meringue, but moist and creamy. It is crust-free, which saves both effort and calories.

Per serving (1/8 of whole cheesecake,about 4.5 ounces): about 224 calories, 6 g. fat, 8 g. protein.

Passover Cheesecake

Two small cheesecakes, one vanilla and one chocolate.

Shavuoth Menu

Here is what I made for Shavuoth:

For an appetizer, homemade cheese blintzes with strawberry compote and sour cream

The rest of the meal consisted of oven poached salmon, asparagus with lemon dressing (Judy Zeidler, The Gourmet Jewish Cook), quinoa with mint and tomato, cucumber salad, leaf salad (Salad with a Crunch), and penne with smoked mozzarella and basil for one meal and macaroni and cheese for another meal.

Dessert was cheesecake, of course.

Oh, and for another meal, I served lentil soup and a quiche made from farmers cheese, jack cheese, and sauteed mushrooms and shallots. The lentil soup was from Judy Zeidler’s book, and the quiche was also (but I swapped out the scallions called for in the original recipe with the mushrooms and shallots because that is what I had in the fridge).

Zebra Cheesecake

Another Daring Bakers Challenge completed!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.