Friday, April 30, 2010

Caramel Butter Rum Cheesecake

The last time I made cheesecake, it was a two-day project including homemade cookies for the cookie crumb crust. This time around I cheated completely by using a mix.

The mix I used was made by Wind & Willow, a brand I wasn't familiar with. But when I was in Cayenne Kitchen a while back, a fellow customer had commented about how good the cheesecake mix was, and I figured I'd give it a try the next time I wanted a cheesecake and I didn't want to go completely from scratch.

So I bought a box of the mix so I could make the cheesecake on a lazy day.

I already had the rest of the ingredients I needed: 1 stick of butter, 3 eggs, and 16 ounces of cream cheese.

The instructions were short and simple. Melt the butter and add it to the base mix along with one egg, press that into the bottom of a pan, saving 1/3 cup for crumbling on top. Mix the cheese and the other 2 eggs with the cheesecake mix and pour that on top of the crust.

The problem came when I got to the instruction to crumble the remaining crust mixture on top of the cheese mixture. It was nowhere near crumbly. So I sort of broke off bits and scattered it on top.
The last addition was a caramel sauce that was drizzled on top.

Then it was baked for 45 minutes, oven turned off and left to rest for another 30 minutes before cooling. Simple. No water bath needed. And after a rest in the fridge, it released easily from the pan. No crack on top. Overall, a success.

The cheesecake was pretty good, but the alleged crumbles on top didn't look much better after baking than they did before. I think that if I make this mix again, I'll skip the crumbles, use all the crust on the bottom, and just have the caramel sauce on top.
Yum