Wonderful Ways to Prepare Cheesecakes

by Jo Ann Shirley

Wonderful ways to prepare cheescakes, pies and flans, slices and bars, and puddings.

Genres: Cookbooks

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Cotton Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have owned this book for many, many years and have found no better source for preparing cheesecakes.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It takes a long time to make and eat three cheesecakes, which is why this book is the last of my summer haul to get reviewed.

Sadly, as much as I enjoy cheesecakes the ones I tried here were fine but nothing special, certainly not up to the quality of the rest of this series. The one that was amazing was amazing only accidentally.

The cookbook uses a wide definition of cheesecakes; basically, any dessert that contains either cream cheese, cottage cheese, or ricotta cheese. Only two use the latter, a Tuscan Cheesecake and an Italian Cheese Pudding. Probably most call for cream cheese but it is difficult to tell without manually counting them up.

The first recipe I tried was the Banana-Cheese Dessert. This is cream cheese, bananas, and gelatin and makes for a nice soft pudding. It isn’t something I’m going to go out of my way to make again, but it was a very nice dessert following Hungarian-style noodles and Michigan-style chicken.

The second recipe was a bit odd. The Sweet Ginger Rum Cheesecake was the recipe I had the most hope for in the book. It looks to be a very traditional cheesecake, with cream cheese in a graham cracker crust.

It turns out that, while in that case it probably didn’t change the result, I probably used slightly wrong amounts for a few of the ingredients in the Banana-Cheese Dessert. Because I’m laughing at the foibles of cookbook authors and ask myself “why would she say 4 tablespoons instead of ¼ cup?” And asking the question is to immediately answer it: I had shortchanged myself on the rum and was about to on the ginger. Jo Ann Shirley is Australian and this is an Australian cookbook. Four tablespoons is not a quarter cup. It’s a quarter cup plus four teaspoons. An Australian teaspoon and an American teaspoon is the same, but an Australian tablespoon is four teaspoons, not three.

Fortunately, that was easily corrected.

I used a gingerbread cookie crust, because I thought (correctly) that it would go well with ginger-rum cheesecake and I was able to use them from my freezer. Initially, however, it was a disappointment. The flavor was fine, but it was, despite managing to use the correct amounts at literally the last minute, very soft and fluffy and didn’t hold its shape at all when served. The ginger and rum flavor were subsumed in the sort of marshmallowy texture.

After game night I put the remaining slices in the freezer because I had a friend over and we were going to be going to restaurants for the next several days. Being typically impatient, when I pulled a slice out of the freezer a few days after he left, I did not wait for it to thaw. And what I discovered was that the fluffy, very messy pie had turned into a beautiful rum ginger ice cream pie! Both the texture and the flavor were brought to a new level by freezing it.

It almost makes me think that “chill well”, the final instructions in the recipe, means “freeze” in Australian cooking.

The final recipe I made was the Italian Cheese Pudding. This was ricotta cheese, ground almonds, and egg whites. This doesn’t say to chill anywhere, and does need to be served at room temperature. Like the Banana-Cheese Dessert, it’s good but probably nothing to add to my rotation.

I am also looking forward to making the Caramel Cheesecake—a bit busy with gelatin, cream cheese, and egg yolk with a condensed milk/maple syrup topping for the caramel. The Cointreau Cheesecake and the Banana Cheese Slice also look interesting. The latter is a cream cheese/banana filling over a shortbread crust.