Mini cheescakes (and round up of other baking)

So, I've used up a little more than half of the flour. Only about 20 pounds to go!

Mini cheesecakes!

Today's baking was mini cheesecakes. I saw some gluten-free mini caramel cheesecake bites on Pinterest, so had to have a go myself!

Here is the recipe for those, also gluten free. I did not use this recipe myself, though.

Because I have a mini pie dish that makes four pies, I decided to make four different kinds of cheesecake. I used this Kraft recipe as my base (because their mini cheesecakes were the closest size I could find to my pie dish). Rather than making my own crust from scratch, I used Kinnikinnick graham crackers.

I used the New York style cheesecake variation from the Kraft website, which has you add a small amount of sour cream and flour to the cheesecake batter. The standard Authentic Foods Classical Blend worked well. After dividing the batter in half, I added the zest of half of a lemon to the half that would make the strawberry and blueberry cheesecakes.

Rather than making caramel from scratch, I just used a gluten free jarred caramel and added salt to it and sprinkled some pink Himalayan sea salt on top. The plain and the strawberry cheesecakes both have a sweetened sour cream topping. For the blueberry cheesecakes, I made a sweetened blueberry syrup that I added to blanched blueberries, then added the other half of the lemon zest.

Here are a few more pictures!



Pink Himalayan sea salt



So many kinds of cheesecake!



Blueberries were blanched so they would be lightly cooked but not mushy

 

And here are a few other things that I've baked in the time since I posted last:

 

An 8 layer red velvet cake. That might have been too many layers...



Snickerdoodle cupcakes




Hazelnut cupcakes with praline buttercream, chocolate ganache, and chopped hazelnuts



Okay, so it isn't baking. This is Loc Lac from the Elephant Walk's cookbook. Delicious!