Carrot cake / cheesecake combo
May. 23rd, 2021 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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livredorSometime around Pesach I happened to see a link enthusing about making cheesecake with a carrot cake instead of a biscuit base. I determined to try that for Shavuot, and I had to do a bit of improvising, but it went reasonably well.
The original link I saw pointed to some kind of diet site, and I wasn't convinced by the idea of trying to make a cake with that many ingredients and low-cal / low-fat, nor with needing an overnight stage in the middle.
So I decided to combine my mother's Jewish friend's very trad Ashkenazi cheesecake, with my mother's Australian friend's carrot cake. I have always preferred Aussie-style carrot cake to English, because it's pretty much just carrot and cake, whereas carrot cake over here tends to veer in the fruit cake direction. Carrot cake batter: beat three eggs with 1 cup sunflower oil and 4 oz caster sugar. Add 6 oz plain flour, 1 tsp bicarb, 2 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt (I think this is basically equivalent to self-raising flour but I'm not completely sure so I just did what it said in the recipe) and more cinnamon than you think is reasonable, 2 tsp. Then fold in 6-8 oz grated carrot, which turned out to be two large carrots, and 2 oz not too finely chopped walnuts.
I set the carrot cake batter aside, ignoring the cream cheese icing, and made the cheesecake filling, ignoring the usual biscuit base. This basically just involves blending together cottage cheese, caster sugar and [ETA: 2] eggs, the quantities I have are a mix of volume (1 cup sugar) and weight (1 lb cottage cheese). I used an old measuring cup marked in both weights of common ingredients and American cups to get round this without having to do any conversion.
Then it was time to assemble the cake. The dietetic recipe suggested alternating layers of carrot cake and cheesecake, but also that you need to dollop the cheesecake to achieve this, and the uncooked cheesecake mix for my recipe is definitely too liquid to dollop. I went for half the carrot cake batter, carefully added half the cheesecake mix, then carefully added the second half of the cake batter, then the second half of the cheesecake mix. I tried not to mix them too much but the cheesecake was too liquid for layering really.
The carrot cake recipe said 1 hour Gas Mark 2, the cheesecake 30 minutes Gas Mark 4. So I decided to go for one hour at the lower temperature and see if further baking seemed needful after that. What actually happened was that the carrot cake rose through the cheesecake, and the whole thing was covered by a golden crust and barely fit into my (reasonably deep) tin. I was a bit nervous to stick skewers into it, so I just tried to add the cheesecake topping which is slightly sweetened sour cream. It's supposed to form a kind of bilayer with the main part of the cheesecake, and I wasn't quite sure about having the sponge in the way, but I tried it anyway. Actually there was no way I could fit two cartons of soured cream on top of the cake which was right up to the brim of the tin, but I poured on as much as I carefully could, and I need to find some other use for the sweetened sour cream fairly soon. The cheesecake is finished by 7 minutes at Gas 5 and then being left to cool in the switched off oven. This did set the soured cream enough that it was no longer dripping over the edge of the cake.
Then I put the whole thing in the fridge overnight, and in the morning was disappointed to find it had sunk in the middle:
So, what came out was that the cheesecake worked fine, the carrot cake was delicious but didn't quite cook all the way through to the middle. I think possibly because the additional liquid of the cheesecake slowed down the cooking process compared to a plain sponge. Also the layering really didn't work; the cheesecake almost all sank to the bottom and the carrot cake rose to the top, so it rather lacked structural integrity compared to a biscuit-based cheesecake. However OSOs devoured the results with great enthusiasm, including the slightly undercooked middle!
I do want to try this again, it's exciting tasting for how easy it is! I think next time I will skip the layering and just put all the carrot cake into the bottom of the tin, then the cheesecake on top. Hopefully that way it will end up more the right way round with a solid base and a creamy top, and I will be able to do the soured cream bilayer thing that makes this particular cheesecake so amazing. Also I will cook it for a bit longer and perhaps a slightly higher temperature; there's not much danger of burning or drying out the carrot cake if it's covered in cheesecake. Possibly I should blind bake the carrot cake for a little while before adding the cheesecake, so that it's a bit more solid, but otoh I don't want a clean division between layers, I want them to swirl together at least a bit. But avoiding the carrot cake rising through the cheesecake layer would be good.
The original link I saw pointed to some kind of diet site, and I wasn't convinced by the idea of trying to make a cake with that many ingredients and low-cal / low-fat, nor with needing an overnight stage in the middle.
So I decided to combine my mother's Jewish friend's very trad Ashkenazi cheesecake, with my mother's Australian friend's carrot cake. I have always preferred Aussie-style carrot cake to English, because it's pretty much just carrot and cake, whereas carrot cake over here tends to veer in the fruit cake direction. Carrot cake batter: beat three eggs with 1 cup sunflower oil and 4 oz caster sugar. Add 6 oz plain flour, 1 tsp bicarb, 2 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt (I think this is basically equivalent to self-raising flour but I'm not completely sure so I just did what it said in the recipe) and more cinnamon than you think is reasonable, 2 tsp. Then fold in 6-8 oz grated carrot, which turned out to be two large carrots, and 2 oz not too finely chopped walnuts.
I set the carrot cake batter aside, ignoring the cream cheese icing, and made the cheesecake filling, ignoring the usual biscuit base. This basically just involves blending together cottage cheese, caster sugar and [ETA: 2] eggs, the quantities I have are a mix of volume (1 cup sugar) and weight (1 lb cottage cheese). I used an old measuring cup marked in both weights of common ingredients and American cups to get round this without having to do any conversion.
Then it was time to assemble the cake. The dietetic recipe suggested alternating layers of carrot cake and cheesecake, but also that you need to dollop the cheesecake to achieve this, and the uncooked cheesecake mix for my recipe is definitely too liquid to dollop. I went for half the carrot cake batter, carefully added half the cheesecake mix, then carefully added the second half of the cake batter, then the second half of the cheesecake mix. I tried not to mix them too much but the cheesecake was too liquid for layering really.
The carrot cake recipe said 1 hour Gas Mark 2, the cheesecake 30 minutes Gas Mark 4. So I decided to go for one hour at the lower temperature and see if further baking seemed needful after that. What actually happened was that the carrot cake rose through the cheesecake, and the whole thing was covered by a golden crust and barely fit into my (reasonably deep) tin. I was a bit nervous to stick skewers into it, so I just tried to add the cheesecake topping which is slightly sweetened sour cream. It's supposed to form a kind of bilayer with the main part of the cheesecake, and I wasn't quite sure about having the sponge in the way, but I tried it anyway. Actually there was no way I could fit two cartons of soured cream on top of the cake which was right up to the brim of the tin, but I poured on as much as I carefully could, and I need to find some other use for the sweetened sour cream fairly soon. The cheesecake is finished by 7 minutes at Gas 5 and then being left to cool in the switched off oven. This did set the soured cream enough that it was no longer dripping over the edge of the cake.
Then I put the whole thing in the fridge overnight, and in the morning was disappointed to find it had sunk in the middle:
So, what came out was that the cheesecake worked fine, the carrot cake was delicious but didn't quite cook all the way through to the middle. I think possibly because the additional liquid of the cheesecake slowed down the cooking process compared to a plain sponge. Also the layering really didn't work; the cheesecake almost all sank to the bottom and the carrot cake rose to the top, so it rather lacked structural integrity compared to a biscuit-based cheesecake. However OSOs devoured the results with great enthusiasm, including the slightly undercooked middle!
I do want to try this again, it's exciting tasting for how easy it is! I think next time I will skip the layering and just put all the carrot cake into the bottom of the tin, then the cheesecake on top. Hopefully that way it will end up more the right way round with a solid base and a creamy top, and I will be able to do the soured cream bilayer thing that makes this particular cheesecake so amazing. Also I will cook it for a bit longer and perhaps a slightly higher temperature; there's not much danger of burning or drying out the carrot cake if it's covered in cheesecake. Possibly I should blind bake the carrot cake for a little while before adding the cheesecake, so that it's a bit more solid, but otoh I don't want a clean division between layers, I want them to swirl together at least a bit. But avoiding the carrot cake rising through the cheesecake layer would be good.
