Goat Note

Although I still have not produced any home-made chevre, I generally have quite a lot of cultured goats-milk goodness in the fridge's cheesebox. Due to various gala cooking projects of late - and despite the efficiency of my Smartyphone shopping app - I found myself over the weekend in possession of one and one-half pounds of delicious tangy buches waiting patiently for some imaginative application to come their way.

Cheesecake!

We all like a big slab of cheesecake a chez Fractured Amy - Sir, particularly, is a fan. But we disagree on the small matter of what a cheesecake actually is. 

Sir was raised on what I think of as the English version of the confection, which is made from a variety of soft cheeses, set with *shudder* gelatin, and covered with a thick layer of red fruit set with cornstarch. The result is fairly sweet, though light and creamy - more a rich mousse than anything else.

To me, there is only one cheesecake on the planet, which I have often made in my own kitchen when my budget and waistline allowed. The recipe may be found in Marquis and Haskell's Cheese Book, although the cheesecake itself is purported to be the one made famous at the redoubtable Lindy's Restaurant in NYC. The procedure (I acquired my copy in 1986 and it is now yellow with age) calls for two and one-half pounds of cream cheese, five eggs (with two additional yolks), heavy cream, lots of sugar, and a heavenly cookie crust. With a bit of grated orange and lemon zest added to the batter, it is the nec plus ultra of baked cheesecakes: rich, creamy, four inches tall, and - let's not kid ourselves - dense as a brick.

Why not try to make a baked cheesecake with all my lovely fresh goat's cheese? Since Sir was due to be jetting off to sunny California this week, I didn't want to commit myself to a whole nine-inch cake. Fortunately, I had in the cupboard a five-inch springform pan, bought ages and ages ago for some reason now lost to the mists of time. A perfect size for a few small slices to wish Sir a bon voyage with maybe a bit left over for breakfast in the days to follow.

The only problematic parts of the recipe were the three tablespoons of flour (not much, when all is said and done, and I reasoned I could use cornstarch instead) and the gluten-rich cookie crust. But really, I asked myself, what is the point of a cheesecake's crust anyway? A baked cheesecake is quite sturdy on its own and really needs no structural support. I reasoned chopped nuts bound together with melted butter would provide a nice crunch and toasty-tasting complement to the sweet cheese. I found some hazelnuts in the freezer (left over from my praline milk jam adventure, I think) and set to work.

This is what I did to make Cheesecake That Gets Your Goat.

I buttered a five-inch springform pan and lined its bottom and sides with silicon parchment.

I toasted one cup of hazelnuts in a 350 deg F oven for ten minutes or so until they were brown and delicious. I ground them up in my food processor until they were chopped finely - but before they turned into an oily powder.

I blended about one-quarter cups' worth of the not-quite-powdery nuts with one tablespoon of melted butter and pressed the mixture into the bottom of the pan.

I beat the twenty-four ounces of chevre until it was soft, then beat in one tablespoon of corn starch, four eggs, and a cup of sugar (I wanted the cake to be sweet, but not too sweet). I also grated in the zest of an orange.

I plopped the resulting batter into my pan, right to the tippy top. But I still had some left over! I hastily buttered two ramekins, dusted their insides with more of the processed hazelnuts, and filled them with the remaining batter.

Into the oven until they were fully cooked! The five-inch cake took an hour and ten minutes, the ramekins about half that time (I should have cooked them in a water bath, but didn't think of that until about half-way through baking). I cooled them on wire racks and put them in the fridge overnight to set up.

I served the big cake with blueberry and raspberry compote poured over the top and it was amazing, I thought, although Others Who Need Not Be Named (Sir, it pains me to say, was not the only one) insisted on their preference for lighter, creamier, more gelatinized versions of the dessert. There's no accounting for taste, I guess!

I unmolded the chevrettes before topping them with some fresh berries held back from compote production. The petits gateaux were very cute - and suffered not at all from a lack of gluten in their crusts - or indeed, from a lack of crust generally.

Rich? Yes. Gluten-free? Of course. Light as a feather? Not in your wildest dreams.

Delicious? Absolutely.

No matter what people say.