Cooking with Dog is a longtime favorite YouTube channel of mine. Chef creates amazing dishes and her meticulous and painstakingly clean way of cooking is for some reason, very soothing. I guess organization and attention to detail gives me pleasure.
Recently she made mini Basque-style cheesecakes – give it a watch, it’s lovely and seemingly easy. The keyword being seemingly. And maybe for others it might be, but I ended up having a lot of trouble with it.
Let’s first start off with the metrics of measurement. The recipe on the site can be converted to US Imperial metrics in ounces, so that’s what I opted for since my measuring cups go by cup measurements which you can convert from ounces. So, using an online converter I started with the cream cheese. 3.53 oz apparently is 0.4 cups. So not even half a cup of cream cheese to make 6 mini cheesecakes? It didn’t make much sense.
I also ruined the first 3.53 ozs of cream cheese by putting them in the microwave for 2 minutes. The recipe called for 3 minutes, which I was sure was too long. But 2 minutes still turned them into the consistency of scrambled eggs. -_-
Anyway, I somewhat blindly crawled my way through the rest of the recipe, improvising on measurements, which I know is a total no-no when it comes to baking. What I thought would be a nice baking session before my 3-hour astrology class had my hair sticking to my neck and all the cream cheese stuck in my whisk and none in the bowl.
Anyway, I managed to make enough mixture for 5 tiny cheesecakes. Since these weren’t meant to be burnt, I actually think mine look a lot like Chef’s. Also, though since they weren’t burnt-looking enough at first, I just switched on the broiler. At that point, I just had to go for it and fortunately it worked.
As one of the trending recipes of this year, I’m glad I tried them. And to be honest, Dalgona coffee required some trial and error too.
Do you have a good basque burnt cheesecake recipe you recommend?
JULIENNE CARROTS 