TWD--Tall and Creamy Cheesecake!

This week's Tuesday's With Dorie recipe was chosen by Anne of Anne Strawberry.  You can find the recipe for the cheesecake on her yummy, great, cool, fun blog that I've linked above.  It's also in Dorie Greenspan's great book, Baking From My Home To Yours.  Get the book!  You've got to go see Anne's take on this cheesecake!  Yummy!  I made the cheesecake on the 23rd so we could eat it for dessert on Christmas Eve.

I went basically plain.  I don't often make a cheesecake that calls for more than two packages of cream cheese, mostly because then it's getting expensive and I think there are some good cheesecakes out there that only need two packages.  That said, I'm super glad I tried this recipe--that calls for four packages (2 pounds!) of cream cheese.  It's definitely good and a step above my usual cheesecakes. 

I changed a few things, but not much.  I always only buy and use 1/3 less fat cream cheese, so that is what I used for this cheesecake.  The recipe also suggests any combination amounts of sour cream and heavy cream in the amount of 1  1/3 cups.  I used one half plus one third cups of sour cream (also light) and 1/2 cup heavy cream. 

And then the only other thing I didn't do that was part of the recipe is the dreaded water bath.  I just didn't want to bother with it and I knew that many others successfully made their cheesecakes without baking it in a water bath.  I knew it could cause cracks in the cheesecake, but I was okay with that.

Here's my beautiful cheesecake baked and ready to sit in the hot-warm-cooling turned off oven with the door propped open for one hour.  Nice!

It was a little darker on top than I wanted, but I was delighted there were no cracks and it was so tall looking!

I had to run a few errands, so I turned off the oven and instructed Kevin to leave it alone until the timer went off and to carefully remove it from the oven.  He told me during the course of the hour, it began shrinking a little.  Why?  Well, my only guess is because of the water bath, because other than that, I followed Dorie's recipe to a tee.  Others have told me it could be because it got too cool too fast or vise versa.  Who knows?  Well, it made a perfect indentation for my planned canned cherry pie filling (Kevin's favorite topping for cheesecake).

I decided not to put cherries over the whole thing, as I knew we'd be eating it over several days.  So we put the cherries on individual pieces.

Does a water bath also prevent the top from browning?

It doesn't really matter, the cheesecake was good.  Kevin thought it was a little too "sour" from the sour cream, and next time I'd use more cream instead.  And because we all just need a lot more fat in our diets!  Pashaw!

Thanks for the great Tall and Creamy pick this week, Anne!  You can check out all the other baker's cheesecakes, too!  Man, I'll bet there's some good ones out there!