Say cheese (cake)! And don't forget cookies.

Well, luckily I am keeping up with my one post a month- however, now that I am a free bird on summertime I expect to update much more! I am nearing the end of my relationship with Gertrude so I'm going to really have to make the most of these next few months with her.... can't have her forget me, right? This past week has been an exciting week for Gertrude... not only did she nail another batch of cookies, but she also managed to not mess up the one dessert I have never actually made successfully before now: cheesecake!

I will start with the cookies I made the day before the cheesecake, which maybe allowed Gertrude to warm up a little bit (well a lot, literally) so she was sharp and ready to go for the next day's bigger challenge.  This past quarter I have been in a lab class that has essentially consumed my life.  Two 6 hour labs a week are basically a day killer... and a week killer... and a quarter killer. And if you imagine that we are doing anything productive and scientific in those 6 hours, there is also just about that much outside work of writing lab reports and studying for quizzes that will ensure this productivity. While I make this class sound horrible, you can imagine that spending time with the same people for these long periods of time (not to mention the time slaving over lab reports) allows you to develop a sense of commodore with your classmates. I guess broken pH meters, ripped protein gels and countless upon countless rounds of Bradford assays can really bring people together.

To celebrate, we had a potluck on the last day and everyone was required to make (bring) something.  I of course, had to bring a dessert.  I ended up taking another recipe off the famed bucket list bake board on pinterest: buckeye brownie cookies! .  This is yet another recipe that is way too easy for its (and my) own good.  Peanut butter... chocolate... really can't get much better than that. I also wanted to integrate some of the best memories from my class into the cookies; my professor worked on research about the photo-sensing properties of a particular cyanobacteria.... so like many proud researchers much of his lectures were based upon these bacteria.  The claim to fame of this particular compound? it is going to dye blue m&ms from now on since it is a natural food coloring.  Therefore, I needed to somehow integrate the color blue into my cookies- I went with some blue icing that may or may not actually contain phycocyanonbilin. I also decorated the cookies with some awesome dinosaurs, microplates, plasmids and birds... things only MCB120L students will understand.

So that was the warmup.  The next day was the true test with the cheesecake.  My housemate mentioned to me that she wanted a cheesecake.... any type of cheesecake. Guess what I find the most difficult baked good to make? cheesecake....any type of cheesecake. So I definitely felt the pressure.  She also mentioned that she wanted something light as in a "oh now it is summer time" sort of thing.  There goes my peanut butter cookie dough nutella cheesecake plan! I tried to think of a fruit that would complement this "light" cheesecake (seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me!). At first I decided I was going to do strawberry shortcake... then I thought that seemed too boring.... I mean, in this day and age you can even get strawberry shortcake flavored frozen yogurt.  So I settled with raspberry white chocolate cheesecake, mainly since I was not sure on my housemates stance on raspberry and dark chocolate mixed together (turns out she is a fan but I was not sure how to casually slip that into a conversation before hand).

Anyways, I went to the store just like a normal person and bought 4 containers of cream cheese (because that is what every normal person does, right?), along with all the other fattening ingredients that would compose my masterpiece.  I started mentally preparing myself for the job. Another element of challenge was that I had a very small window of time to make this cheesecake (about 2 hours).  This left me very little time to put this whole thing together.  I used this recipe for raspberry white chocolate cheesecake  with oreo crust- it was really the picture that sold me.... did I think mine would look exactly like that?? no way.  Did I think it could even be close in comparison?? one could hope. Making this cheesecake, I had two major complications 1) I accidentally added the sugar in with the melted chocolate chips and heavy cream.  This was the kind of mistake that I was hoping would simply work itself out 2) my attempt at making a water bath. For those who don't know, a very common way to make a cheesecake is to put the cheesecake pan in a large pan of boiling water. Of course, the only pan I had that was big enough was a large springform pan.  And of course, that springform pan was a little bit leaky and could not hold the water.  Therefore, the water I put in it completely spilled everywhere...... so no water bath was to be had.  I just wrapped the pan in various layers of tin foil to try to buffer the heat a bit.

So, I put my cheesecake into the oven and hoped for the best.  Even after I took it out when I thought it was done (sorta just going with my intuition here), I had to wait a torturous 8 hours to let it set.  So I didn't actually find out it was actually good until the next morning!  So, did it look as good as the picture? nope.  But it definitely looked somewhat close, which I, as a complete amateur cheesecake maker was quite proud of.   It was definitely a little rough around the edges... the Gertrude touch!  But the most important thing was that it was gone within a day... that is what assures me it was a success.