I made this cheesecake the other day. It was my first time making a cheesecake, in fact, I haven’t been a big lover of cheesecake until recently. I found a recipe for classic cheesecake and added some orange zest to the mix. The orange zest was the best decision ever. Adds a nice lightness to the dense body of the cheesecake. I messed up the crust a bit by forgetting to measure how much graham cracker crumbs I had so the crust mixture came out a bit too… gluey. The result was a harder crust that wasn’t inedible, but just not as texturally enjoyable as it should have been. My bad. Next time I will make sure I actually have enough graham cracker crumbs.
I also made an absolutely delicious raspberry and blackberry sauce to go over the cheesecake, because that is how I like it. I put equal parts sugar and water on the stove, then once the sugar was dissolved, dumped in a whole bunch of fresh raspberries and blackberries as well as orange zest and fresh orange juice. I let that stew for a bit on the stove and then put it in the blender to finish breaking down the fruit. I think I should have left it on the stove for a bit longer in order to thicken up a tad, but I’m happy with the flavor, and I don’t even mind the runnier quality of the sauce. I jarred up my left over sauce and have it in the fridge. I’m thinking we should use it up on waffles or pancakes – something to that effect once the cheesecake runs out. For the photos I just found a spot of light that was coming into the kitchen and had at it. Despite the natural light I still needed the shutter speed around 1/50th of a second and could have stood to use a tripod, but I was in too much of a hurry to actually eat the piece of cheesecake, lol!
