Stilton Baby Blue Cheesecakes

May 12, 2015

Stilton, pear and walnut is a classic combo, and I adored this variation. I love playing with recipes that sit on the fence of not-quite-dessert, not-quite-savory. They intrigue me because each time you experience the unexpected. These little cheesecakes follow in the same foot steps–a possible transitional course between the main and the dessert, something that helps you digest and prepares the palate for the sweeter dessert to come. They weren’t quite a dessert for me, so I folded them into my dinner plans. I brined a pork loin and rubbed it with a curry spice blend. I BBQ’d the pork and served it with a dressed cherry tomatoes, then followed with a simple green salad topped with the Stilton Baby Blue Cheesecakes, just me and my husband in our garden with a very light cold dry red. It was a really lovely and simple dinner. For us, the cheesecakes didn’t have a strong blue cheese flavour at all. We found ourselves eating them for breakfast the next morning. So here’s my experience.

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Ingredients

Volume Grams Ounces

Instructions

PREPARING THE PAN

It’s moments like this when I’m so grateful I’ve got lots of equipment. I just happened to have to right size muffin tin in my drawer. I found cutting the parchment a bit tedious, but it was definitely for a good cause.

I also had a cutter that was the exact right size for the bottom of the cups.

MAKE THE WALNUT BASE

Whizzing up walnuts is nothing, but getting the skins off them is. Gees, what a pain. I peel chick peas and pistachios easier than I remove the skins off walnuts. It just pushes me to my limits. I gave up quickly and whizzed them, skins and all, and yup they were bitter in the final cheesecake, but it was okay against the creaminess of the two cheeses.

I weighed the walnuts (7 grams) into each cup, but ran out after I filled 10.

I had two empty cups to go. I find I’m having this problem quite often: with the Lemon Posset, and the Strawberry Genoise. And the cake layers don’t measure half properly. Is anyone else having this trouble? Is my scale off? What could possibly going on here?

MAKE THE FILLING

It looks like butter, but it’s cream cheese.

Even with the cream cheese at the right temperature, I had a difficult time getting the cream cheese smooth. Everytime I scraped the bowl and beater, new lumps of cream cheese fell into the mix begging me to beat it more. The HIGHLIGHTS FOR SUCCESS warns me not to over beat the batter or the batter will be too thin and it will dip in the center after it’s baked. Didn’t want that, so in the end, the batter wasn’t completely smooth.

FILLING THE CUPS

Again, I anticipated that my batter would be short, so I put in 44 grams in each cup. This was a perfect amount. Why didn’t I get the proper amount of batter for 50 grams? Such a mystery. And something else I realized…it’s important to keep the side of the cups walnut free if I want the filling to be clean. In other words, no walnut crumbs sticking to the sides of the cup.

BAKE THE CHEESECAKES

I was half expecting these to be baked in a bain marie. Thankfully, they were not. They baked perfectly.

COOL THE CHEESECAKES

I could tell everything was in good condition because as I cooled the babies, they were pulling away from the sides of the cups, but when it came time to unmold them, they didn’t come out nicely.