BerryMint Cheese(cup)cakes with White Chocolate Ganache

Close-up shot of BerryMint mini cheesecakes.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with cheesecake. Really! It’s true! Despite the fact that in the past 6 or 7 years I have been come to be known as somewhat of a cheesecake artiste, cheesecake was for many years VERBOTEN! in my life. You want to know why?….. my big secret?….. I hate cheese.

I can hear the silence now. The confusion. (The horror?)

“All cheese?” you ask.

“Um… yeah… pretty much,” is my response. The short answer: there’s some sort of a taste going on in cultured/fermented milk products that, quite literally, tastes like vomit to me. Actual vomit. As in, if I get the slightest taste of it, it will trigger my gag reflex. Even strong cheese SMELLS will make me gag. Yeah, I know, crazy right? WTF? Trust me on this one, I wish with all my heart that I liked cheese. People hide it in things and don’t tell you. I have to quiz my waiter/waitress at almost every restaurant to make sure there isn’t any cheese hidden in strange places. I’m not a picky eater – dear god, I LURVE food. Cheese (and sour cream, and certain cultured butter) is the one thing everyone seems to love, but will make me retch. Life would be a lot simpler if I could just “get over it”, as some tactless people in my past have urged, people for whom my cheese-hatred was somehow offensive to their sensibilities.

Well, it’s not gonna happen. I’m 30 years old, and have TRIED numerous times to conquer this thing and every time, my taste buds and olfactory recepters revolt. If I were gonna grow out of it, it would have happened by now. Just call me a very specific supertaster!

So why, you may be thinking, do I make so many damn cheesecakes? HOW THE HECK DOES THAT WORK? Well, I have actually gotten better over the years when it comes to cheese. Certain cheeses in very small amounts in places where their noxious flavor is sufficiently masked is acceptable to me. Mozzarella on pizza is generally safe (heck, that cheese is barely a cheese since it isn’t left to culture/rot/etc. for any time at all). And cream cheese, though it tastes gross to me on its own, can be conquered if enough other mitigating factors are involved.

So finally, back to the topic of cheesecake. Many years ago, I came to realize that not all cheesecakes are inherently evil, despite the dreaded word in its title. Some cheesecakes, the ones I hate, basically taste like a brick of cream cheese with some sugar mixed in. Yuck. If I wanted to eat cream cheese, I’d freakin’ eat it already, and as y’all know, I don’t want to. Once in a while, however, I’d come across one that would be a bit creamier, a bit different, where the flavor of cheese did not prevail. I was intrigued. I took one of these recipes and started to tweak it. I was sure I could eventually come up with something that worked for me (I do like a challenge!). And lo and behold, I did. I blame the heavy cream. With a full cup of it in there, it manages to round out the flavor to the point that you taste DAIRY, not cheese. This is a Good Thing.

Lo and behold, my cheesecake was born. Lots of cheese for body, lots of cream for flavor, eggs for texture and binding, vanilla for unctuousness, and last but not least, lemon and booze for balance. Not flavor – at a tablespoon each you’re not going to really taste them in there. A good cheesecake is all about balance of cream and tang, depth and simplicity, heavy and light. The lemon and alcohol, I discovered, was my key to making the flavor really POP. There’s somethign about citrus and alcohol that just cuts through the heaviness of the cheese and the cream, brightens it, like that squeeze of lime over your pad thai. I truly believe that the little tinge of sour that they bring is what takes the flavor over the top.

Anyway, enough about cheesecake (I really could rhapsodize forever… I’m such a prose-slut). Or I should say, enough about cheesecake in general – and more about THIS cheesecake. The one I baked last night, styled this morning, and quickly snapped photos of before running off to work (where they were instantly devoured, of course)

After browsing through hundreds of renditions of my cheesecake recipe, I was filled with blog-envy. All those gorgeous photos! The flavor combos! Oh, for shame! It’s my recipe, yet I didn’t even make one of my own. The least I could do, as a brand spankin’ new member of Daring Bakers, was add my own humble rendition to the fray. I needed a flavor combo that was new to me, and wasn’t like any of the hundreds of recipes I’d already perused (even though many of them seemed to have stolen flavor combo ideas right out of my brain!). I’ve always kind of been enamored of the mixture of berry flavors with mint. It sounds weird to some, but it really, really works if you balance it right. You don’t want the berry to be too sweet, nor the mint to be too spicy. I thought the mellow, creaminess of cheesecake would be a perfect platorm on which to balance those two flavors. AND BOY WAS I RIGHT! So here goes, my official UNofficial first Daring Bakers post

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge. The full recipe can be seen there – I won’t bother posting the full thing here. My (re)interpretation resulted in BerryMint Cheese(cup)cakes with White Chocolate Ganache. My changes/additions are tallied below:

* The heavy cream was heated briefly in the microwave, then a handful of torn mint leaves were left to steep as the cream cooled. The leaves were strained out prior to incorporating it into the batter.

* The crust was made with buttery shortbread crumbs and less melted butter.

* The liquor I used in the batter was white Creme de Menthe

*A vanilla bean created lovely little specks in the batter, rather than extract.

*I opted to make cupcake-sized cakes (so cute!), baked in a water bath for about 30 minutes, which when chilled were perfectly cooked and not cracked!

* Each cheese(cup)cake was topped with a quick white chocolate ganache: splash of cream was heated in the microwave, then a bar of good quality white chocolate was broken into the cream. Mix with a fork until smooth and dreamy… and no, I didn’t measure any of these amounts!

*Atop the pool of ganache I placed a single blackberry, which I then coated in a puddle of berry glaze. The glaze was simple: I took a couple of spoonfuls of seedless blackberry all-fruit preserves and a tablespoon or two of pomegranate molasses and microwaved them together for about 20 seconds. Stir until smooth, and again, no measuring! This glaze can also be used for presentation – just make a little extra and drizzle on the plate.

*Garnish with more blackberries and mint leaves, as desired. Voila!

And last but not least, the pictures!!

A silver platter of BerryMint mini cheesecakes.

Another close-up shot of BerryMint mini cheesecakes.

An army of BerryMint mini cheesecakes marching.

Mini BerryMint cheesecake plated, image 1

Mini BerryMint cheesecake plated, image 2

Bite taken out of the mini BerryMint cheesecake.