Daring Bakers- Cheesecake

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

This challenge was ideal for me this month. You can probably tell from my lack of posting crafty things that I’m hella busy with college work and my actual life (sigh!) at the moment. Deadline after deadline after deadline means my spare time is normally taken up by having a relaxing ale with friends and letting my hands rest around a pint glass rather than gripping onto needles and threads. I’ve been unable to join in with lots of Daring Bakers challenges due to this. Either the challenges are too time consuming, too expensive to join in with or not appetizing to me enough for me to be able to see a return on the baking. I know that’s not exactly the correct attitude for a Daring Baker, but it’s the perfect attitude for someone applying for Art Schools. This time, however, the challenge was affordable, quick and mouthwatering. Cheesecake! Boy, was I ever glad to see that.

My sister visited home for Easter, and being a dairy avoider I chose to make it for her homecoming and ommited all the dairy things. I used one tub of silken tofu, 2/3 of a tub of toffuti cream cheese (that stuff looks like cement! Nice.) and 2/3 of a carton of soy whipping cream for the batter instead of the cream and cream cheese. I made the batter to the recipe flavour wise, plain vanilla is good enough for me! But for the base I used bourbon biscuits, the vegan favourite. I then kinda took the idea of a ‘Mexican Turtle Cheesecake’ and ran with it.

That’s a plain chocolate ganache, using the remaining toffuti, soy whipping cream, soy marg and dark chocolate. I’ve studded it with Spicy toffee pecans that were sooooooo delicious I wanted to cry that I had to put them on a cheesecake and not eat them all. I melted a little butter in a pan, put in a lot of sugar, some allspice and a helluva lot of cayenne pepper, then a bunch of pecans. I stirred everything until it all caramelized, then I turned it onto greased greaseproof paper ala praline (minus the bashing everything up into praline after.)

Mmm! So tasty! Definitely making those pecans again, and if I fancy a cheesecake- I’ll certainly go back to this recipe. You can find it on Jennybakes.com!