Caramel Cheesecake

HCH 7 / November 2015

Caramel Cheesecake, by Eyal Streett

I was thinking about what we should cook. Maybe some Halloween recipe? Too late, that’s just behind us. Winter food? Maybe, but it’s not cold enough yet to think of those serious stews. And then I saw the obvious: there’s a birthday in the air. The magazine is turning one year old!!! Gosh, if I would know so much when I turned one… So the obvious brought the obvious and here it is: our celebration cake!!!

Let’s cook!

Ingredients

150 gram digestive cookies (10 cookies)

150 gram Oreo type cookies (15 cookies)

125 gram butter

250 gram cream cheese

250 gram mascarpone

2 Tbsp. white sugar

2 Tbsp. brown sugar

1 1/2 Tbsp. vanilla extract

200 ml. liquid cream (preferably chilled)

5 Tbsp. caramel (dulce de leche as it’s called in Madrid. Manjar as it’s called in Chile)

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small sauce pan

23 cm round cake pan

hand mixer

Instructions

Melt the butter in the sauce pan on a low flame.

Meanwhile crush your cookies into a large bowl. Crush them as fine as possible, you could use a food processor, if you prefer.

Once the butter is all melted mix it together with the crushed cookies. This is the base of your cake. Take this crumb mixture and place it firmly on the bottom of your cake pan. Once you’ve got a nice firm base to your cake leave it in the refrigerator to chill.

(Making a firm base for the cake. My daughter Dalit is helping out!)

Add to a large mixing bowl the cream cheese, the mascarpone, the sugars and the vanilla extract. Blend it well together with your hand mixer. I like starting on a medium speed for about one minute, then going up to a fast speed and a minute later back to medium speed for another half a minute. You want to have a nice blended mix, it should take a few minutes.
Add the liquid cream to the mixing bowl and blend it in on medium-high speed for another 2 minutes, more or less. You shoul have a nice thick but fluffy substance by now.
Get the cake base from the fridge. Take 2 spoons of your caramel and spread them all over the bottom of your cake. Work with the paste. After moving it around a bit it’s much easier to work with and spread around.

(Spreading the caramel around)

Add half of your cheese filling to the cake. Take another 2 spoons of caramel and gently spread them over the cheese filling. This is tricky, but gentle is the keyword here.

(Adding the cheese and making the 1st layer)

(Adding more caramel)

Add the rest of the cheese and try to spread it as even as possible. Our cake is practically ready now (how easy was that?!). Chill it for at least 3 hours.

(The cake is ready for the refrigerator)

After it has chilled for some hours you can open the cake pan and then decorate the top with at least one spoonfull of caramel. I decorated it with a message for the one year anniversary of Humano, creativamente humano, but as you can see my decorative skills aren’t sky-high so I’d rather not explain how exactly one decorates a cake…

PLEASE let me know if you’ve got any tips. They would be highly appreciated.