In the interests of full disclosure, I must warn any potential readers that half this post is about language and the process of devising recipes, not about cheesecake at all. If you want to skip to the part with an actual recipe, it's posted separately under Orange and Poppyseed Cheesecake.
My love for baked cheesecakes starts somewhere quite unusual, I suspect. It began as an expletive.
Surrounded by overwhelming quantities of anatomical descriptions, blasphemies and cultural references to choose from when requiring an expletive, I found them all lacking. What I needed was an expletive I could use when everything had just turned to brick and I wanted to declare as such boldly, loudly and (above all) without recriminations from everyone nearby. I took to using several, one of which was—for no apparent reason—"cheesecake." After declaring "Cheesecake!" for a year or more, whenever I stubbed my toe, misplaced my wallet or my computer bricked and I lost an hour's work, it seemed high time I learn to actually make this dish whose name I'd been misusing. I found a recipe online and started experimenting. The results were mixed (my habit of tampering with the ingredients proved deleterious, since I hadn't yet worked out what could be changed safely) but I produced a few passable samples.
Then I decided to make a birthday cake, a birthday cheesecake to be precise, and wanted to make something a little different. There are literally (OED, definition I1b not sense I1c) hundreds of thousands of different recipes scattered across the internet, but none of the ones I looked at were quite what I was after. I wasn't exactly sure what I did want, so it was experimentation time.
My old engineering self insisted that stage one was a tabulated comparison of the nicest looking recipes I could find, and then analyse for commonalities in their ingredient ratios. Naturally, the results were pretty varied, but not quite random. While there were instances of higher and lower quantities of absolutely every ingredient, a common thread appeared to be:
Crumb:
Biscuits : Butter + (optional) Nut Meal : Butter
2 : 1 + (optional) 4 : 1
Filling:
Sugar : Eggs : Cornflour : Cheese : Vanilla Bean Paste : Sour Cream (optional)
155g : 3 Eggs : 1 Tablespoon : 500g : 1 Teaspoon : 300ml
Cheese of choice mainly varies between philadelphia*, mascarpone and quark, with a few other options on the side. Chocolate was sometimes mixed in to the filling, accompanied by a slight decrease in the quantity of sugar.
It was a start, and gave me something I could tinker with. One concept that particularly intrigued me was the introduction of nut meal into the crumb, partly for flavour but presumably for texture as well. There were also a large number of recipes incorporating either molten or grated chocolate into the filling. Never having done either before, I pulled out my single-serve springform pie tins and made some miniature cheesecakes.
One recipe called for hazelnut meal, which I decided to test. After sampling, I can confidently say that it's a bad idea unless you really really love hazelnut, as it was extremely overpowering. As for the choice of adding molten vs grated chocolate, the preferences from those who sampled them were consistently for the molten chocolate.
So now to choose a flavour...
I have lost count of the number of passionfruit cheesecakes I've made (of both the baked and bushwalking varieties) and can't say I was keen to just make another one of them. I contemplated combining dark chocolate and raspberry, one of my all-time favourite flavour combinations, but decided cheesecake would prove a poor medium to convey it. Butterscotch seemed promising in combination with white chocolate, and I was working out a recipe when an unusual thought struck. Orange and poppyseed...
I was inspired by a cake my housemate had made around a month ago, which had poppy seeds ground to a flour and mixed through one layer. It was a delicious cake and I'd had half a mind to incorporate the technique into something for a while.
Baked cheesecake consists of two to three layers: the crumb, filling and an optional topping. I tried to make different flavours dominant in each layer. I crushed some Nice biscuits (I tried to use scotch fingers out of curiosity in the test cheesecakes, but Nice work much better) and mixed in coarsely ground poppyseed instead of nut meal, with a little orange zest for a subtle citrus flavour. Into the filling, I added no small quantity of white chocolate (it makes the cake wonderfully rich), some finely ground poppyseed (I didn't want any crunch in the filling's texture), lashings of orange zest and juice. Two miniature cheesecakes were baked alongside the main dish and I tested these with and without a topping made from thickened orange juice.
The final cake suffered slightly from the inaccuracy of my oven's thermostat (I may need to install an oven thermometer to monitor this manually), with a couple of cracks forming in the top, but was satisfactory. It was a cheesecake, definitely a cheesecake, but the texture change wrought by the poppyseed made it a most unusual one. The crumb was firmer than usual, and held together better than the same recipe without poppyseed. The filling was slightly denser and lay somewhere between a dense, moist cake and a cheesecake.
Were these changes for the worse? No, I don't think so, nor for the better. I prefer this style of crumb, but others may prefer a more traditional texture. The resulting cake is just different a style. I may yet consider some refinements to add in another iteration but the recipe as it stands certainly produces an unusual but delicious cheesecake. If you'd like to try making it, the recipe is here.
* My browser is insisting this should be capitalised, but I disagree; philadelphia has become a genericized trademark for a particular type of cream cheese in colloquial usage. It has not yet have achieved sufficiently widespread usage to appear in dictionaries as such. Nevertheless, that is how it is being used in everyday speech.
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