Finally I got the chance to bake again. Well there were lots of things preventing me from baking. One major reason was the electricity. I was paying the wrong huge electricity bills for the last three or four months. The bills were mixed up with another tenant. Blah blah blah and to cut it short : I thought it was so expensive I refrained from using the brand new oven.
Well last night I was making New York Cheesecake. Okay I wasn't actually planning to bake. I just could not sleep. I was planning to do it on a daylight - asked a friend to come around on next week but it had been half an hour and I was just lying on my bed, my eyes were wide opened, my mind was wandering - oh it's so silly. Half an hour later I found myself in the kitchen weighing ingredients.
I am not a good planner to start with. I didn't realize I didn't have any oven mitts or chopping board. This recipe requires me to do the "warm bath" baking. That is to place the cheesecake pan in a large roasting pan and pour boiling water into the roasting pan to come halfway up the sides of the springform pan. I thought I didn't have the roasting pan, but I actually do! It came with the oven when I bought it.
It's hard to find regular sour cream in Surabaya. I found the light sour cream so I took two tubs of them. The cream cheese was also light as well and it wasn't cheap. The cost of the ingredients was almost 400k, with that I could get two cheesecakes from Harvest. But I was determined to bake the NY cheesecake so here I am. One thing that got me worried was the warm bath technique. It was my first time and I was concerned about taking the pan out of the oven (I had no oven mitts and I knew it was gonna be humid and superhot). I had no food processor so I had to crush the biscuits by myself. It was a tiring job my thumb is now red and I could see an air bubble on my thumb.
While I was baking the cake, there was this lunar eclipse happening. I went to the balcony but couldn't see the moon so I watched it live via Techland.
Well the cheesecake that I've baked looks exactly like what's in the book. It looks yummy but it is actually just okay. It is eatable but it's not that good or anything. I've been trying to figure out what went wrong. First of all I had problems with the ingredients. The recipe calls for regular cream cheese and regular sour cream. I found the light ones. I also couldn't find digestive biscuits (the recipe calls for Nice biscuits) so I was using Regal Marie instead - which turned out to taste not as good as what I had expected. Another thing: vanilla extract. Back in Melbourne I had no problems in finding it. It is labeled exactly word by word "vanilla extract" and I don't really know what it is in Indonesian. I used Koepoe - venili aroma. I opened it and it smelled different. Anyway that was the only thing I had in hand.
So the next time I bake another cheesecake, I'll try to use Biskuat instead. I'll look for good vanilla extract or essence (they are two different things - essence is the imitation of the extract but you can't really tell the difference in the cake). Lastly, I'm gonna look for the real cream cheese. Oh well but I think I'm not gonna bake any cheesecake anytime soon.
