Lemon Drop Cheesecake

After a long, busy, sort of stressful week the best thing to do on Friday night is grab a beer, crank up the music, and BAKE!

So lemon drop cheesecake just sort of happened. I used a pre-made graham cracker crust because I was being lazy. I know that I make an awesome home-made crust, (graham crackers, sugar, melted butter, go) but sometimes I just don't feel like it.

So cheesecake filling:

1 package softened cream cheese
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg
Secret ingredient of awesomeness
Juice from one lemon.
A pinch of flour.

I mixed together the first 4 ingredients before deciding what sort of cheesecake I was making. Then I spotted lemons in my fridge and ran with it. I cut the end off of the lemon, and thoroughly squeezed the juice into my filling. One caveat... it may be wise to do this over a strainer of some sort. I ended up picking a few seeds out of the mix. Save the rest of the lemon for garnish! After adding the lemon my filling was too runny. I added just a tiny bit of flour to thicken it up. I think some corn starch also would have worked well. I poured that all into my crust, and stuck it in the oven on 350.

While my cheesecake was baking, I made some candied lemon peels:

1 lemon skin
Water
Sugar

I put the water on to boil, then set about cutting strips of lemon peel (scraping off any left over fruit and as much of the white bits as possible). I sat them in a strainer in the boiling water. After the boiled for 5 minutes to get nice and tender, I pulled them out, and pulled the pot off of the burner. I poured out some of the water (I had added more than was necessary to cover the lemon peels while still in the strainer) and then put the pot back on to boil. I added sugar until it was super saturated. Once that was at a good boil, I added the peels back and turned it down to simmer for a bit until removing it from heat and letting it cool down. I strained the lemon peels back out and set them aside.

When my cheesecake came out, I garnished it with the yummy candied lemon peels and stuck it in the fridge for household consumption!

Brownies and Bourbon!

So my mom gave me a brownie cookbook for the holidays last year, and I hardly bothered to crack it (sorry Mom!). I was trying to come up with something to bake this evening, and I decided to take a look. Low and behold I found a brownie recipe that called for BOURBON!

The brownie batter:

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter
4 squares unsweetened chocolate
4 squares semisweet chocolate
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla

So I mixed that all together, and threw in some secret ingredient while I was at it. Popped it in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes, and took it out to cool

The fun part comes next. I'm not patient by any standard, so though I should have waited long for the brownies to cool, I hopped right on to making the topping.

Praline Icing Recipe:

5 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons bourbon
2 cups confectioners sugar.

So I melted together the butter and the brown sugar until it was all melty and bubbly. Then I was supposed to add the three tablespoons of bourbon. But I added six. Cause that's how I roll. And I used my favorite... American Honey. Mmmmmm, yummy. Some of it may have spilled straight into my mouth. What a tragedy!

Now for the confectioners sugar. I realized partly through the recipe I realized my powdered sugar was at work for our epic Mario Kart gingerbread house (trust me there is a post to come on that one!). So I had to substitute. I took two cups of sifted granulated sugar and two teaspoons of cornstarch. I threw that in the blender and blended it all together. Hooray for ghetto powdered sugar!

Anyway, so stirred that all into the praline mixture until it was nice and smooth and poured it all over the brownies. Ok, so I tasted a bit as well, and dear gods is it delicious. The extra bourbon was totally the right choice!

Hooray for bourbon and brownies! Fanfuckingtastic!