April 27th, 2008
A month ago, Matt and I joined the Daring Bakers, a group of folks (representing nearly 800 blogs around the world) who like to be challenged in the kitchen. Every month, one lucky member chooses a recipe that lets all the others use and/or learn an important baking technique. April’s challenge included both the bain marie–French for water bath–and tempering chocolate. What scrumptious treat did we make for our very first Daring Bakers project? Why, frozen cheesecake pops!
Obviously, mine were rather messy. I had a lot of trouble scooping the cheesecake, as you can see below, into the walnut-sized balls suggested by the recipe. Growing impatient and starting to swear, I finally gave up and cut the cake into cubes.
Oh yeah, the recipe. I suppose you might want that, huh? Well, here it is:
Cheesecake Pops*
(from Jill O’Connor’s Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey: Desserts for the Serious Sweet Tooth)
Makes 30 – 40 Pops
5 8-oz. packages cream cheese at room temperature
2 cups sugar
¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
5 large eggs
2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (I used two teaspoons of fresh lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon zest in place of the vanilla.)
¼ cup heavy cream
Boiling water as needed
Thirty to forty 8-inch lollipop sticks
1 pound chocolate, finely chopped – you can use all one kind or half and half of dark, milk, or white (Alternately, you can use 1 pound of flavored coatings, also known as summer coating, confectionary coating or wafer chocolate – candy supply stores carry colors, as well as the three kinds of chocolate.)
2 tablespoons vegetable shortening
(Note: White chocolate is harder to use this way, but not impossible)
(I added one tablespoon of lemon zest to the chocolate.)
Assorted decorations such as chopped nuts, colored jimmies, crushed peppermints, mini chocolate chips, sanding sugars, dragees) - Optional
Position oven rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees F. Set some water to boil.
In a large bowl, beat together the cream cheese, sugar, flour, and salt until smooth. If using a mixer, mix on low speed. Add the whole eggs and the egg yolks, one at a time, beating well (but still at low speed) after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and cream.
Grease a 10-inch cake pan (not a springform pan) (I used a springform pan. To prevent the batter leaking into the bain marie, and the bain marie from leaking into the batter, I tightly wrapped my springform in three layers of aluminum foil.) and pour the batter into the cake pan. Place the pan in a larger roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with the boiling water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake until the cheesecake is firm and slightly golden on top, 35 to 45 minutes.
Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and cool to room temperature. Cover the cheesecake with plastic wrap and refrigerate until very cold, at least 3 hours or up to overnight.
When the cheesecake is cold and very firm, scoop the cheesecake into 2-ounce balls and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Carefully insert a lollipop stick into each cheesecake ball. Freeze the cheesecake pops, uncovered, until very hard, at least 1 – 2 hours.
When the cheesecake pops are frozen and ready for dipping, prepare the chocolate. In the top of a double boiler, set over simmering water, or in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water, heat half the chocolate and half the shortening, stirring often, until chocolate is melted and chocolate and shortening are combined. Stir until completely smooth. Do not heat the chocolate too much or your chocolate will lose it’s shine after it has dried. Save the rest of the chocolate and shortening for later dipping, or use another type of chocolate for variety.
Alternately, you can microwave the same amount of chocolate coating pieces on high at 30 second intervals, stirring until smooth.
Quickly dip a frozen cheesecake pop in the melted chocolate, swirling quickly to coat it completely. Shake off any excess into the melted chocolate. If you like, you can now roll the pops quickly in optional decorations. You can also drizzle them with a contrasting color of melted chocolate (dark chocolate drizzled over milk chocolate or white chocolate over dark chocolate, etc.) Place the pop on a clean parchment paper-lined baking sheet to set. Repeat with remaining pops, melting more chocolate and shortening (or confectionery chocolate pieces) as needed.
Refrigerate the pops for up to 24 hours, until ready to serve.*
We weren’t allowed to make major changes to the cheesecake recipe–no mocha, pumpkin or, sadly for this Montana girl, huckleberry cheesecake allowed–but we could temper any kind of chocolate and decorate the pops with our choice of sugar sprinkles, jimmies, crushed graham crackers, or anything else that caught our Daring Baker fancy. I chose a flavor near and dear to my bitter little heart: lemon. My sister, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has two Meyer lemon trees in her backyard. Earlier this month, she mailed a ten-pound box of her lemons to me. Meyer lemons, a Chinese cross between a lemon and a orange, are juicier and sweeter than the regular Eureka lemons usually found in the produce section of your local grocery store. I wanted to use the lemons in my cheesecake and my chocolate coating. I added fresh lemon juice in place of the vanilla extract and a tablespoon of zest to the cake batter. To bring out the flavor and enhance the color of Randie’s Meyer lemons, I dipped my pops in Guittard white chocolate. Despite what the recipe says, it wasn’t that hard to work with white chocolate. Just to add more of that wonderful, fresh Meyer lemon flavor to the pops, I added another tablespoon of zest to the chopped chocolate and vegetable shortening.
It melted beautifully. Now, I should mention I halved the recipe. Not only did I not want 40 chocolate-coated pieces of creamy temptation sitting in my freezer, I work in a small office. Everyone there loves to eat, but I knew even they could not make that many sweet treats disappear. Once again, the recipe was inaccurate. Halving the recipe did not result in 15-20 pops. Even with my impatience at scooping cheesecake and eventually cutting it into cubes larger than the recommended two ounces, I had 25 pops. Tragic, I know. Naturally, in the interest of quality control, I had to try a few before I shared them with my coworkers.
Despite the trouble I had with the recipe, the finished cheesecake pops were a smooth, rich, lemony delight. I don’t think I will make them again (oh, go ahead, twist my arm), but I enjoyed experimenting with melted chocolate and cheesecake. And I loved finding yet another recipe for my beloved Meyer lemons. With any luck, the May challenge will be lemon soufflé.
*The text of the recipe was lifted from the Daring Bakers’ site, courtesy of Elle and Deborah.
Forming the cheesecake pops was the most trying part of this recipe. Even though my cheesecake was refrigerated overnight and par-frozen, within seconds of spooning a glob into my hand the cheesecake was like a semi-solid pudding; after 2-3 pops I could no longer form balls in my hand and had to wash my hands off and start again. I had originally had the idea of doing different shapes - squares, triangles, tetrahedrons (I kid…) - but I quickly gave up that idea. However a previous idea I had, to insert maraschino cherries into the pops, did pan out. I bought a small jar, drained them and froze them, then inserted them into the spoonful of cheesecake and formed the ball around them, inserting the pop stick into the center when I finished. 
