August 8th, 2007: cheesecake!

The baked goods here are generally quite tasty - however, all of the cakes are very light and fluffy (made with lots of whipped cream). So those of us from the North American continent were thinking about nice rich and dense real cheesecake and how we wanted one (there's something similar to cheesecake here but it is way too light and fluffy). After about two weeks of rounding up the various ingredients (finding vanilla on Texel was challenging for some reason and it was eventually found in Den Helder), having to find suitable cookies to substitute for graham crackers (there's nothing like them here), having to make/find measuring cups and spoons, and much discussion over if a cheesecake could bake properly in a small microwave/convection oven (since neither one of us has a real oven), we decided to attempt it...

There was a lot of math involved in this baking project with the various conversions between cups, ounces, grams, Celsius and Fahrenheit. The largest pack of cream cheese we could find here was only 200 grams (no large tubs of the stuff available here). In case you were wondering, 40 ounces of cream cheese were required to make two cheesecakes and 28.3495 grams equals 1 ounce...

My apartment is so small and the outlets are in such stupid places that we had to sit on the stairs to use the mixer...
And yup, since I don't have a table (and the coffee table was completely full of other stuff) the only place for the cookie dough was on the floor.
We could only fit 4 cookies in the "oven" at once, so baking was a SLOW process! And there was a minor conversion mistake with the cookies, which resulted in too little butter... they were still good since they had chocolate in them - but not as good as usual.

We were really excited when the first cheesecake came out of the "oven" looking normal after an hour. As we were baking, my neighbors kept appearing in my apartment...
The final products! Go us!

We brought the cheesecakes into work (since we definitely didn't need to eat 2 of them ourselves) and therefore we were pretty popular around the office today.
When we originally started talking about making cheesecake, everyone seemed to think that it was made out of a hard aged cheese or something... Some people were sort of skeptical about trying the cheesecake but in the end everyone liked it. Although I'm excited that the baking experiment was successful, it did take us from ~6pm until 1:30am to get all of this stuff baked, so we probably won't be doing this again anytime in the near future...