Second-Stab Saturday: Delayed Cheesecake

We have a quick second stab today! Did you know that apparently you can just freeze cheesecake batter?

Make-ahead Individual Cheesecakes Line a cupcake pan with papers. Use the cheesecake recipe of your choice. Press a bit of the crumb mixture into each cupcake. Then pour the batter among all of them. Fill each cupcake about ⅔ full. Put the whole pan in the freezer. When they are frozen, remove the cupcakes from the pan and place in a sealed container. Leave in the freezer until you want to bake them (you can freeze them for at least 3 months). When ready to bake, heat oven to 350°. Put the cupcakes back into a cupcake pan (you don't need to defrost them). Bake until set and jiggly, about 30-45 minutes. Refrigerate, then top as desired.

When we made the Saint Patcaken, we had a bit of extra cheesecake batter that didn't quite fit into the pan. So, we pressed the extra crust into a cupcake liner, poured in the batter, and put it in the freezer. 

We all agreed that after eating far more Saint Patcaken than anyone should, even this tiny bit of cheesecake would be far too much. The freezer let the last of the cheesecake wait until we recovered.

Obviously, anyone who's sauntered down the frozen dessert aisle would know that we are not the inventors of the frozen cheesecake. Furthermore, a lot of people put already-baked homemade cheesecakes into the freezer, where they keep better than most other desserts. But we wondered what happens if you don't bother baking one first.

While you can purchase a frozen cheesecake and bake it at home, I wondered if you can just freeze an unbaked cheesecake batter you made for yourself. Do they have to add extra chemicals or perform laboratory-grade cheesecake processing at the Sara Lee factory before they freeze it and ship it out? Or can you just take any recipe and freeze it?

A few months after we had recovered from Saint Patcaken, we popped this little cupcake into the oven next to dinner, and 45 minutes later it had puffed up until it looked like a cauliflower. At first I thought 45 minutes is a dreadfully long time to bake a cupcake, but then I remembered that usually cupcakes aren't frozen solid before introducing them into the oven.

It's so cute and puffy, isn't it? I don't know if it's the alcohol in the cheesecake evaporating while it baked (you may remember that we put Irish cream in it), whether cheesecakes just puff a lot when you freeze them before baking,  or if it's something to do with this particular recipe. Perhaps the cheesecake would have looked more "correct" and flat on top had I baked it at a low temperature the way most people do with cheesecakes. Unfortunately for this little cheesecake pouf, I baked it at a heathenishly hot 350°. (I didn't think setting the oven the slightly too hot for cheesecakes would matter since the this one was so tiny. Also, as previously mentioned, I just put it in the oven next to supper which was baking at 350°. We were not running the oven just for one cupcake.)

If the cheesecake had retained its adorable cauliflower-like appearance, I would bake a lot of cheesecakelets like this. Unfortunately, like a souffle, it fell down as it cooled. By the time the cheesecake was cool enough to eat, it was no longer photogenic. Although, if I were inclined to do this again, I could easily make use of that crater in the center, filling it with an artful blob of whipped cream and some thoughtfully-placed fresh fruit.

That crater is not a visual defect but an opportunity to get creative in hiding it.

But even if the cheesecake looked a bit less than presentational on the outside, it was perfectly fine when we cut it open.

If you didn't look at the unsightly collapsed top, you would never know we froze the cheesecake. The texture was precisely the same. We cut this little cake up so everyone could have a bit, and it was most warmly received.

So if you want to make cheesecakes ahead of time, you can freeze them and then bake them at your leisure. This one was in the freezer for a few months before we baked it. And if they look far less than perfect on top, just hide the unsightly imperfections and craters with your toppings of choice.