Much Ado About Cheesecake: Guest Post by Neil Plakcy

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.
  

Neil Plakcy Guest Blogger: Helen's Chocolate Chip Cheesecake

Today in the continuing series of 'cross-over' 'chocolate' mystery writers, I welcome Guest Blogger Neil Plakcy.

A native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Neil Plakcy has brought murder and canine mayhem back to his home town with In Dog We Trust.  Neil Plakcy is the author of Mahu, Mahu Surfer, Mahu Fire and Mahu Vice (August 2009), mystery novels which take place in Hawaii, as well as the collection Mahu Men: Mysterious and Erotic Stories. His M/M romance novels are GayLife.com (MLR Press, 2009), Three Wrong Turns in the Desert (Loose Id, 2009) and Dancing with the Tide (Loose Id, 2010).  He is co-editor of Paws & Reflect: A Special Bond Between Man and Dog (Alyson Books, 2006) and editor of the gay erotica anthologies Hard Hats (Cleis Press, 2008), Surfer Boys (Cleis Press, 2009) and Skater Boys (Cleis Press, 2010).

Plakcy is a journalist and book reviewer as well as an assistant professor of English at Broward College's south campus in Pembroke Pines. He is a member of Sisters in Crime, vice president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and a frequent contributor to gay anthologies.
Plakcy is also a Chocoholic!

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Neil Plakcy's In Dog We Trust and the Chocolate Ear Café

I grew up in a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about a forty-five minute drive from Philadelphia. I was fascinated, as a kid, by a square stone building in the center of town, which at the time was a ladies’ clothing shop.

When I started writing my mystery novel, In Dog We Trust, I was doing a lot of freelance food writing, including a couple of pieces for Saveur, and I was particularly obsessed with chocolate. So I gave that obsession to a pastry chef from New York named Gail Dukowski, one of the book’s supporting characters, and put her in that old stone building on Main Street, in a town very much like the one I grew up in, along the Delaware River. Her café is called The Chocolate Ear, a pun on the word chocolatier.

“Gail painted the interior a pale yellow, which made the room seem sunny even in winter, and decorated the walls with vintage posters advertising chocolate products, many of them in French. The white wire tables and matching chairs seemed like they’d come direct from Paris, though they’d been padded with cushions more comfortable to American bottoms.

“The café always smelled of something delicious—lemon tarts, strawberry shortcake, or hot chocolate topped with cinnamon. The glass-fronted case was filled with exquisitely decorated pastries—petit fours covered in white fondant with tiny sugar flowers, individual key lime tarts scalloped with whipped cream, fudge brownies studded with walnuts and chocolate chips. The signature cookie was a chocolate version of the elephant ear, a curly pastry with a rich cocoa flavor. An industrial-quality Italian coffee machine churned out mochas, lattes and cappuccinos, filling the room with the sound of drips and foams.”

My hero, an adjunct college professor, spends a lot of time at Gail’s café. “On my way home from teaching, I often stopped at my favorite spot in town, The Chocolate Ear café, for a raspberry mocha—a reward for reading and grading my students’ ungrammatical papers. The owner, used the best quality beans, Guittard chocolate syrup, and home-made whipped cream, and despite my coffee snobbery I’d been seduced by the sweet drink.”

One of the challenges I faced was finding a way to get Rochester, the golden retriever my hero adopts, to the café. I solved that by putting a couple of tables and chairs out on Main Street, and making Gail a dog lover who always has a couple of fresh-baked dog biscuits on hand for Rochester—though not chocolate, of course. All the characters in In Dog We Trust, good and bad, know that dogs shouldn’t eat chocolate. (Cue the ominous music. Though squeamish readers should know that no dogs were harmed in the writing of this book.)

One of Gail’s specialties is chocolate-chip cheesecake, and though her recipe is probably fancier than mine, I think mine is pretty good. I got it from our cleaning lady, Helen Wielninski, who first made it for me when I was a teenager. I’ve tweaked it since then, but in her honor I still call it Helen’s Cheesecake.

Helen’s Cheesecake
1 cup chocolate wafer crumbs
1/4 cup melted butter
5 eight ounce cream cheese packages
8 eggs
3 tablespoons flour
dash salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups sugar
8 ounces chocolate mini-chips

Leave the cheese out to soften. Combine 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 add in the chocolate mini-chips. Regular chocolate chips are too heavy for the batter and will sink to the bottom—though you can always add some if you like, to enhance the chocolate flavor of the crust.

Pour into the springform pan. If you prefer your cheesecakes without a crack down the center, you can place in the pan in a tray of water. I don’t mind the crack, because it lets me see into the creamy heart of the cake, with those little chocolate bits of deliciousness smiling back at me.

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.

In Dog We Trust is available at Smashwords and for the Kindle.