Daring Bakers April Challenge: Cheese and Wine Course

Leave it to me to turn dessert into a dinner course- the well know cheese and wine course :-) The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

Daring bakers returned to the sweet side this month and gave us the opportunity to get our creative juices flowing. We were provided with a basic plain cheesecake recipe and given the liberty to add, subtract, and change the recipe to create some unique flavors.

I asked a friend her favorite kind of cheesecake and she said Vanilla Bean. I was thinking, great what a boring choice. Ho-hum, boring, run-of-the-mill vanilla. But, I did have some vanilla beans I wanted to use up. Then I thought… Let’s increase the alcohol content in the cheesecake. Lastly, I had to do a little more tinkering with the basic Vanilla Bean Cheesecake and added a caramel sauce, an alcohol based caramel sauce. Hehehe… I can hear the gasp.

So, I present to you...

Kahlua French Vanilla Bean Cheesecake with a Kahlua French Vanilla Caramel Sauce...

I am getting really busy with graduation in less than 20 days from the date of this post. So, below I am including the ingredients without instructions. I am pretty sure you can figure out how to put them together on your own, :-)

Cheesecake Ingredients

Crust:
- 2 cups Leibniz Butterkeks (German Cookie in Yellow package with Red writing- I bought mine from Wal-Mart)
- 1 stick butter
- 1 ½ tbs sugar

Filling:
- 2 sticks cream cheese
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2/3 liquid- (at least 1/3 cup heavy cream and the rest Kahlua French Vanilla)
- 2 tbs Kahlua French Vanilla
- 2 vanilla bean innards
Caramel Sauce:
- 2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 tbs light corn syrup
- heavy cream and Kahlua French Vanilla
- 4 tbs butter

Celebrate Good Time, Come On!

Today I attended the last class of my law school career! I know…How exciting. I am going to a small celebration of a great year event tonight and I wanted to bring something…special. Well, what better to celebrate than with a little alcohol? I bought a rather large bottle of French Vanilla Kahlúa for a special reason that shall be revealed later this month ;-). So, I have been trying to use up the remainder of the bottle buy cooking different treats.

Adult Chocolate Chip Cookies
The way in which true sophisticated adults would want their cookies- Dark Chocolate, White Chocolate, and Kahlúa!

The recipe is simple. Start with the basic chocolate chip recipe. Replace half of the chips with dark chocolate chips and replace the other half with white chocolate chips. Lastly, depending on just how much Kahlúa taste you want, start by replacing the vanilla extract in the recipe with Kahlúa. If that is not enough, and in my case it was not, I replaced the liquid the eggs would provide with Kahlúa. Between the Kahlúa and any other liquid you use, go for the consistency to be similar to your normal recipe. I used 3/4 a cup and no eggs.
Chocolate Cupcakes with Kahlúa Butter Cream Frosting
The best way to celebrate and not look like an alckie is to mix your alcohol in your uncooked food, so the intoxicating components don’t evaporate :-) Just kidding. But, Kahlúa does have a special way of adding an extra diminution of flavor to your treat.

Modifying your favorite butter cream frosting recipe, trade off all liquid in your recipe for Kahlúa depending on your taste. I traded off 2 tbs of milk and 1 tsp of vanilla with Kahlúa.

So get out your favorite alcohol and consider how to modify your favorite recipes!