Cheesecake with Fruits

Earlier this week, I posted about an outfit I made for a brand new baby. As I mentioned, her father and I became good friends while working together. One of the things I learned about him while working together is that homeboy likes his sweets!!

I knew I wanted to take some sort of dessert along with us to meet Aria, but was really undecided of what to make. I knew I needed something easily transportable. Y was sick, so that meant it was K and I on a train for an hour and a half with the stroller, Aria's gift, a gift for her older brother and something sweet.

I have a wonderful cake holder, but it would have been really difficult with everything else. Cookies? I wanted something more celebratory. Pie? Doable, but not terribly exciting.

After seeing a friend's birthday cake on Facebook, it was decided - cheesecake with a fruit topping!!

I totally forgot to take photos of it after taking it out of the tin and cutting, but it looked (and tasted) just beautiful.

For the cheesecake, I used an Emeril recipe.

I followed it fairly closely, substituting Maria cookies for the graham crackers. I also skipped the sugar in the crust. For the cheesecake filling, it seemed like an awful lot to me (maybe I have a small tin??), so I halved it. After adding the fruits on top, it just perfectly touched the top of the tin - lucky!!




I started the fruit process by segmenting an orange. I'd never done this before; quite frankly it scared me. Turns out, it is so super easy. I watched a video on YouTube and it worked out perfectly. It only took a few minutes as well.









With that part out of the way, I started layering on the fruit. First were the strawberry halves and mini grapes.




Next up were kiwi slices.




I wanted a full ring of oranges, but there simply wasn't room. I ended up with just a few layered on top.




Once all the fruit was on, I painted on a glaze to make it all shiny and pretty. The glaze recipe says to pour it in the cake, but mine was definitely not liquid enough. It ended up being almost jelly-like. It tasted nice, but wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. To be honest, painting it on was a lot of work. Something I could have just poured would have been way easier. Does anyone out there have a good recipe for this?





It's possible that it's my fault it's not liquid enough. I followed the directions up until the last step where you pour the corn syrup in and let it boil a bit longer. I did this, but it seemed that the more it boiled, the thicker it got. I got nervous and turned off the fire.

It wasn't that big of a deal though. My friend and his wife seemed to enjoy it. Y wanted me to bring a slice home for him, but my friend got a bit pouty about it. I'll take that as a good sign!!

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