Second-Stab Saturday: More Dormeyer Cheesecake

I love when I can simultaneously clean the freezer and make dessert.

Cheese Pie Royale 1 pie pan lined with a graham cracker crust 12 oz cream cheese, at room temperature 2 eggs ½ tsp vanilla ½ cup sugar Cinnamon Topping: ¾ pint (1½ cups) sour cream 2 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla Heat oven to 375°. Thoroughly beat eggs and sugar. Add cream cheese, and beat at low or medium speed until mixed. Pour into pie pan, leaving about ⅜" of headspace in the pie pan for the topping. Sprinkle with cinnamon, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cheesecake jiggles in the center but does not slosh. While the pie is baking, whisk the topping ingredients together. Spread it over the pie after it's baked. Heat oven to 475°. Return the pie to the oven and bake 5 minutes. Cool the pie, and then refrigerate it until thoroughly chilled. Source: All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer, 1946

After making the poppyseed cake, we had half a brick of cream cheese in the freezer. I didn't know what to do with it, but I also didn't want to let it go to waste. I decided I could use it to revisit a recipe that didn't get a fair chance last time: the Dormeyer cheesecake. Some readers may recall that due to a faulty oven, we burned it. And burning a cheesecake isn't a valid recipe test. 

Since we had all the ingredients at hand, I cut the recipe amounts down to the tiny pie pan's worth of cream cheese that had been waiting in the freezer.  Then, while supper was already baking, I slid this into the oven next to it.

Unlike the first time we tried this cheesecake, we didn't burn it. (I do love using an oven with a working thermostat.) The non-burnt Dormeyer cheesecake looked so pretty that I wished I'd bought enough cream cheese to make a full-sized one. (I later realized I forgot the cinnamon, but it was too late.)

I really wanted to try the sour cream topping that came with the recipe. I've never had a cheesecake with sour cream on top. Given that the Dormeyer company comes from Chicago, is this a Chicago thing? The recipe handout credits every recipe that doesn't have a brand name to Dormeyer's own test kitchens, which apparently means they had people in the company office send in recipes to round out the book. So maybe there are some Chicago regional specialties between the other recipes.

After baking, the sour cream on top of our cheesecake wasn't completely set, but it was at least firm enough not to drip. The cheesecake itself looked oddly... aerated. Is it just me, or does it almost look like a slice of well-leavened cake?

If we turn the cheesecake around and look at where the crust would have been had I bothered to make one, you can see the texture better. I think it looks like I added a lot of baking powder to it.

The cheesecake tasted fine, but the texture was weird. It was almost but not quite curdled. Perhaps a better way to describe it is "aggressively fluffy." I have to wonder if this is a regional preference, and the people of the greater Chicago area think this is what cheesecake should be like.

But while the cheesecake itself was a bit underwhelming, the batter was amazing. I wouldn't toss the recipe aside, but I wouldn't bake it either. It's probably fantastic if you put pour the batter into an ice cream machine. To the Dormeyer people's credit, the part of this recipe that involved using a Dormeyer mixer went great. But the part that involved an oven did not.