Classic Cheesecake

I can't believe it's already near the end of April, and this is only my second post this month. Having two babies really caught me off-guard, I guess (ha-ha). Hopefully by now I've gotten into the swing of things and will be able to get back to posting regularly.

A while ago a friend of my husband's asked me to bake him a cheesecake. After making his, I realized that I kind of wanted a cheesecake for myself. So I decided to look up a great recipe for just the basic, original cheesecake. I found one of Martha Stewart's that sounded good, so I went with it.

The first thing I did was, in compliance with the recipe, make the crust. I actually ended up making two crusts, because with my first I followed Martha's suggestions. It ended up being WAY too thin and crumbled from being overbaked. So when it came to Round 2, I doubled the crust recipe. This seemed to work well.

I ran out of eggs so my cheesecake had only three eggs and one egg white (made with Just Whites). I also didn't have lemon zest, so I used half a teaspoon of lemon extract instead. Finally, my cheesecake baked an hour and forty-seven minutes, two minutes longer than Martha advised. It didn't look done enough in the center, but near the edges was getting a little too brown for my comfort.

 

 

Of course, I wish it would have been perfectly white all across the top, but it turned out rather pretty. (Though my husband said it looked like a wheel of cheese.)

It tasted amazing. The texture was just a tiny bit less smooth than I'd have liked, but I suspect I might have overmixed the batter. Overall, this is a great recipe for cheesecake that I imagine can be altered fairly simply. I highly recommend this one to everyone.