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Friday, September 9, 2011

Waste not, want not ...

... or something like that.  I once told my co-workers the story about my year of finding the "perfect" cheesecake recipe.  Like with any experiment, there are "good" results and there are "bad" results.  I worked through all different types of recipes -- dense ones, fluffy ones, recipes with dozens of ingredients, and ones that had only a handful.  Going the scientific method, I meticulously reviewed each recipe I found and went through the process of elimination of finding a recipe that worked just right for the way I like to bake.  When my co-workers learned that entire "bad" cheesecakes went into the trash, they looked like I just ripped their hearts out right in front of them! 

So, when I made the hidden heart cupcakes last week, I was very conscious of not being wasteful.  As such, instead of carving the cake into hearts over a trashcan, I carved over a bowl.  At the end, I had a huge bowl of what essentially was cake crumbs!  After all my decorating, I also ended up with a lot of cream cheese frosting, as well.  So, what to do with all this? 

I decided to try my hand at making cake pops.  When I found out how to make cake pops, the idea did not appeal to me at all.  Cake pops are just cake mashed together with way too much frosting to make a Play-doh like consistency and free-formed into a ball and placed on a stick.  But since I had basically had everything already, why not just try. 

I've read on another blog that cake pops at coffee shops are a little greasy because of the type or amount of frosting they used as the binder.  So I was very mindful not to add too much frosting to the mix.  Normally, cake pops are covered in a candy-like shell made of brightly colored white chocolate chips. But I didn't have any of that in the house so I decided to just melt all the semi-sweet chocolate chips I had leftover (which was a surprising amount). I mixed in a few pats of butter to make the chocolate a bit smoother and easier to dip in.  The result was a very fudge-like coating once it cooled in the fridge.





Oh ... and in case you're wondering ... the best NY-Style cheesecake recipe I've found is found here:
http://www.joyofbaking.com/Cheesecake.html.  And my coworkers seem to like cheesecake topped with salted butter caramel sauce.  That recipe is found here:  http://www.mytartelette.com/2007/03/pillow-cheesecake-with-salted-butter_17.html .  The cheesecake recipe found on this site is much more light and fluffy.  It's good but I prefer cheesecake to be more dense.

1 comment:

  1. I just want to say, that my body almost shut down after one bite because it thought i was dead and went to heaven. JUST SAYING, THESE WERE INSANE!

    you should sell them -

    =D

    (to me....everyday....)

    ReplyDelete