Neil Plakcy:
I was brought up to like cheesecake. When I was a child, we used to get New York style cheesecake at a little store called Mother’s, about an hour away from our home in the Trenton suburbs. There was always at least one Mother's cheesecake in the big, free-standing freezer in our basement. They came in square white boxes made of heavy-duty cardboard, with a little plastic window on the top so you could look in and see the tiny ice crystals forming on the top of the cheesecake. The available flavors and toppings were listed next to the window, with a box where the clerk made a check mark with a grease pencil.
New York cheesecake is heavy and rich and has the consistency of a solid block of cream cheese. It has a graham cracker crust, and Mother's put a light dusting of crumbs on top, too, on cakes that did not have cherries or pineapple or blueberries on top. When you took the cake out of the freezer, you had to allow at least two hours for it to defrost properly, but we rarely had the patience to wait that long. The semi-frozen slices we ate stood stiff and straight, and they were icy to the tongue. But if you let the cake rest on your tongue for an extra minute, all the creamy richness would literally melt into your mouth.
When I was a teenager we stopped having to drive to Mother’s, because Helen Wielninski came to work for us. Helen was a heavy-set, big-busted woman in her sixties who came to us once a week in a flowered smock to rearrange the dust. If she was in a good mood, or we were celebrating a special occasion, she brought us a cheesecake, made according to her own special recipe. The cakes were baked in a springform pan, one with a removable bottom and a spring on the side so the pan could be opened. They often had cracks in the middle. Eventually I learned that was because as cheesecake cools, it contracts. If the edges remained stuck to the pan, cracks resulted.
Helen's cakes were just as thick and rich as Mother's, but because they were homemade they had a special freshness that made them seem even better. Helen gave me her recipe when she retired, and I made the cake a few times before I left for college.
Once firmly ensconced in college in Philadelphia, I discovered the Cottman Diner, a twenty-four-hour haven in the Northeast, about thirty minutes from campus. Whenever any of my friends had access to a car, six or eight of us would pile in around midnight for the adventure and the great cheesecake.
I first had chocolate cheesecake at the Cottman Diner. They swirled chocolate syrup into the rich sweet cream cheese, and I realized that there were worlds to explore that Helen had never dreamed of. During my junior year, I bought a springform pan and set up my cheesecake laboratory in the galley kitchen of my dormitory apartment.
There are two ways to make chocolate cheesecake. You can blend the syrup completely into the batter, making the whole cake the color of milk chocolate, or you can swirl a ribbon of the syrup into the cream-colored batter for a marbled effect. Another crowd-pleasing favorite is chocolate-chip cheesecake, but my first efforts, though delicious, were failures. My chips all sank into a chocolatey layer above the graham cracker crust. After several tries, I discovered mini-chips, which were tiny enough to hang suspended in the cake. Further experiments included the addition of liqueurs into the mix and the use of canned pie filling as topping.
My friend Iris insisted that there was money to be made in my cheesecake. During the spring of my junior year, we targeted two street festivals coming up on campus and started to bake. The play showing at the campus theater where we both worked was Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, so we named our budding venture Much Ado About Cheesecake.
I borrowed a car and drove out to the Northeast, where I bought a twenty-pound log of cream cheese from a dairy. I had to borrow a scale from a drug dealer friend to measure the cheese out into forty-ounce portions. We bought dozens of eggs, pounds of sugar, and crushed hundreds of graham crackers for crumbs.
Every night, when I didn't have too much homework and I wasn't working at the theater, I mixed and baked. I stored the bounty of my oven in the freezers of friends, and bribed them to help with the mixing with the promise of free cake. I narrowed the varieties to plain, cherry, chocolate chip and pineapple, and Iris and I set up a booth at both festivals.
Though it was fun to sit outside and talk to friends, occasionally selling slices of cake, it was very time consuming, and so was all that baking. Buying all our ingredients at retail at the local Pantry Pride cut into our profit margin, and I figured out that it would take a lot of cheesecake before we were using enough ingredients to buy wholesale in bulk.
After we counted up the receipts and divided the profits, it turned out Iris and I could make more money at the theater, so I returned to being a recreational baker. The recipe is still great, though, and it is offered here with one warning: baking of massive numbers of these cheesecakes at one time can have grave consequences for your enthusiasm, not to mention your waistline.
Helen's Cheesecake with Chocolate Chips
Ingredients
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup melted butter
5 eight-ounce packages of cream cheese
8 eggs
3 tablespoons flour
dash salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups sugar
8 ounces chocolate mini-chips
Directions
Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. Spray the bottom and sides of a 9” springform pan with Pam or a similar spray to allow the crust to release from the sides of the pan, reducing the chance of cracking as the cake cools. I do this even if I’m using a non-stick pan, just to be sure.
Leave the cheese out to soften. Combine graham cracker crumbs and butter and press into the bottom of a 9" springform pan.
Cream the cheese with a wooden spoon, and then, using an electric beater, add in the eggs, one at a time.
Then mix in the flour, sugar, salt and vanilla. Beat until there are no more lumps, then swirl in the chocolate mini-chips.
Pour into the springform pan, and bake at 500 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn the oven down to 250 degrees and bake for an additional 40 minutes. Then turn the oven off and let the cake cool in the oven for one hour.
I like this cake best after it has been refrigerated, but if you're too eager to wait it tastes just as good right out of the oven.
Notes:
· You can buy graham crackers and crush your own, as we used to do, or buy ready-cracked crumbs.
· I use unsalted butter for all my baking nowadays, but in the past I’ve used salted. I don’t think it matters.
· You can also top this cake with a chocolate ganache if you like, to make it extra chocolatey.
· You can also experiment with smaller springform pans by reducing the size of the recipe, or simply making two different versions—one with chips and one without, or one with a chocolate swirl and one with chips. I’d stick with the 500 degree temperature to firm up the cakes, and then reduce the 250 degree time as necessary. But remember to leave the cake in the oven until it has completely cooled to minimize cracking.
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Neil Plakcy is the author of the golden retriever mysteries, set in the Philadelphia suburbs. Semi-reformed hacker Steve Levitan and his golden retriever Rochester nose out the clues to crimes to help Steve’s police detective buddy. The most recent in the series is In Dog’s Image; those who are series completists will want to start with the first, In Dog We Trust. Neil’s website is www.mahubooks.com.
