First things first: Yes, the title is “cheese cake”, not “cheesecake.” Why? I have no idea. That’s how it was written on my grandmother’s recipe card, so that’s how it’s written here. Deal with it.
A caveat before we get started: I didn’t have quite enough graham cracker crumbs and certainly didn’t feel like driving to the store just to get a box, so the crust on this one is shorter than it would be otherwise. If you look in the dictionary under “lazy”, you’ll see a picture of me.
Here’s what you’ll need:
1 ¼ Cup Graham Cracker Crumbs
¼ Cup Butter, softened
1 Tbsp. Sugar
2 Tbsp. Flour
⅛ tsp. Salt
⅓ Cup Sugar
1 8 oz. pkg. Cream Cheese
½ Cup Milk
2 Egg Yolks, beaten
2 Egg Whites, beaten stiffly
½ tsp. Lemon Extract
Blend graham cracker crumbs, butter and sugar thoroughly. Press into a 9” round pan and up the sides.
In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt and sugar. Cut in cream cheese until dry ingredients are completely absorbed. Add milk, egg yolks and lemon extract and mix well. This can be done by hand with a whisk. You can be doing this part while your egg whites are getting beaten in the mixer.
Fold in beaten egg whites.
Pour mixture into crumb-lined pan.
Bake in a 325-degree oven for 45 minutes. Yes, really. By some miracle, this baking time was right on target.
This should also be served with some kind of fruit topping or sour cream sauce. I decided I was going to try this one plain because of the lemon extract, but it didn’t really impart that much flavor.
Well yum, yum, yum. While this is always called a cake, it is a pie, yes? I am afraid of pies, as crust from scratch is second only to bread making in my cooking fears list. Moral of the story, perhaps a graham cracker crust would work for other pie varieties? Or should I just give it up and a buy Pepperidge Farm pie crust?
I mean, the directions could have said to make this in a springform pan instead of a pie pan. It’s still a cheese cake.
As for actual pie crust, I’ll have to address that at some point down the road because I haven’t gotten to the pie section of the recipes yet. Frozen pie crusts are probably better than shelf stable pie crusts just because there’s less possibility for having lots of preservatives and other crap in there, but I haven’t bought those either.
I look forward to your pie crust posts!
“Golden cheese cake.” Isn’t that what they call elder porn?
I’ll see myself out.
I was thinking about making a pumpkin cheesecake this weekend, but the classics are classic for a reason. I may have to go with Grandma Butcher’s recipe.
It’s possible that when your grandmother wrote down this recipe cheese cake was two words; that happens a lot in English. Words start out in pairs, then they get hyphenated, then they become one word. If you read Dickens or Austen, really anything from the 19th century, you see a lot of hyphenated words, like good-bye and to-morrow.
Closer to the present, we went from electronic mail to E-mail to e-mail to email. I worked for a company that clung to “E-mail” until the bitter end. Our systems had mandatory spellcheck, you couldn’t turn it off, and if you wrote, “If could email me the attachment…” it would change to E-mail and you had to manually fix it and incur the wrath of the red squiggly underline.
It didn’t help that we outsourced our IT and the budget was probably $100 per year.
Actually, it just dawned on me that it’s kind of weird that cheesecake is now one word. Sponge cake isn’t. Cupcake is. Banana bread isn’t. Shortbread is.
I would not want to be a non-native speaker of English attempting to become fluent in the language.
Completely agree, Cousin Matthew
My grandma’s old recipes have lots of what to me nowadays looks like superfluous hyphens.
You just fold it in.