Turtle Cheesecake

1. 01 Introduction: Welcome to this class. In this class, I will teach you how to make this delicious turtle cheesecake with homemade caramel and chocolate sauce. First, I will teach you how to make the crust. Next, I will teach you how to make the caramel sauce. Then I will teach you how to make the caramel crust. Next, I will teach you how to make the feeling. Then we will cook our cheesecake and let it cool. I will then teach you how to make the chocolate sauce for our cheesecake. Next, I will show you how to remove the cheesecake from the pam. Finally, we will use the caramel and chocolate sauce and pecans to decorate the top of our cheesecake. I am a self taught baker. Many years ago, I decided I wanted to open up my own home bakery. I had this business for several years until my husband got a job offer in a different town across the country. We felt like this was a good move for us, and so I closed my bakery and we moved across the country. Now, here in the new city, I do not want to go through the steps to open up another home bakery, but I still love baking. And as a retired school teacher, I love teaching. So I have decided to share my skills with you on skill share. This class is aimed at the baker that would like to learn how to make a delicious cheesecake that has fewer calories than most cheesecake as we use a low fat cheese in our cheesecake. I look forward to teaching you the skills in this class. Let's move on to lesson number one, making the crust. Oh 2. 02 Making the Graham Cracker Crust: We are ready to start making the crust for our cheesecake. I'm going to be doubling the recipe because I actually need two cheesecakes. So you only need to do half the amount that I'm doing of everything. The first thing we need to do is melt the butter. I have a large bowl here, and I'm going to take my butter. I want to unwrap all of them, and I've lined them all up like this, and I'm just going to cut the butter in about one tablespoon increments and stick them in the bowl. This will help it melt faster. And I'm not having to really measure it exact because it's all going to melt. It's just mainly I'm breaking it into much smaller sizes. I'm now going to put this in the microwave and let it melt for 2 minutes because I'm doing twice as much. Yo pa, we only need 1 minute at 50% power. While my butter is melting, I'm going to break up some crackers and put it in my food processor. This is one packet, and I'm going to start with that and I want to make the powdery. That's looking pretty good. Now I'm going to add the next package, and I'm going to start with just two packages. See how that measures, and then decide if I need to add the third package or how much of the third package I need to add. Okay, let's do these crackers. You can see that looks really good. We're going to put that aside. Our batter has melted in the microwave. We're now going to stir it. The batter is hot and the bowl is still warm. So we do want to try first to see if we can get it to all melt. If not, we can do it another 30 seconds. I'm going to go ahead and do it another 30 seconds. Here is our butter after the other 32nd, and you can see it's pretty much melted. We're now going to add our one cup sugar. Stir that in, and then I'm going to need five cups. Of our gram cracker. There's one cup, two cups, four cups. That one package did not quite have enough crumbs. But sometimes I like to make chocolate crumbs. So I'm going to supplement a little bit of chocolate crumbs with this and have a mixture of gram and chocolate so that I have enough crumbs. Now, I just want to mix this all together. If you're just doing one cheesecake, one box of gram crackers would easily do it. You also could completely change this recipe and do it all with the chocolate crackers. It's really up to you. We want to make sure all of the crackers get mixed in. The butter, so there's no dry cracker. As you can see, there is no dry cracker, and that's what we were going for. Now we need to prepare our pans and then put the crust in the pan and bake the pie crust. I have these two spring form pans. And what I mean by spring form is they have this that unlatches at the side, so it's easier to remove the cake. I find with my cheesecakes. They have a tendency to not want to release from the bottom. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to spray my pan down on the side, a little bit on the bottom. I'm not too worried about the bottom, because I'm going to put parchment paper on the bottom. I'm going to take this parchment paper, and I want to take it up just a little bit, and that sewed up, it will form to the pen. And then I'm just gonna stick the parchment paper into the pan. And I do want it to come up the sides. And the reason why I want it to come up the sides is because I want to be able to get underneath it when I remove it from the pan and be able to remove the cheesecake from the parchment paper. Now, I don't it all the way up the sides. So I'm going to take this out for a moment. And I'm going to cut some of this bigger part off. I just need it somewhat coming up the sides, not all the way. So mainly, I don't want those big corners coming up. Now I'm gonna stick this back in, and you can see now that fits quite nicely in the pen. And then I'm going to spray this also down. And I'm going to do the same with the other pad. And now I'm going to take my gram cracker crumbs and put it into each of the pans. I'm going to start with that, see how it goes. And I actually like, at this point, to use my fingers. And I really want to press this down on the bottom and then get into it and press up the side. And this is where you're going to get that parchment paper to cling more to the side as we press that crust up the side. And we don't need it all the way up the side, but we wanted a good inch or two up the side. And this is where I'm going around making sure that crust is pressed against the side. Which also is forcing the parchment paper to be against the side. And if you see some spots like right here where there's not as much, I can go ahead and add some that was left in the bowl. Okay, I leave that one alone and do this one. We're now going to take our two crust and bake them in the oven at 3:25 for 10 minutes. We'll be back at that point. Our crusts are about ready to come out of the oven. There is the timer. Let me pull this out and show you. There is our crust. We're now going to let it cool completely. 3. 03 Making the Caramel Sauce: We are ready to start making the caramel sauce. We do this on the stove. I want the pan to be on low heat. And to that, I'm going to add the butter, and I'm going to just let the butter sit for a minute till it starts to melt, and then we'll add the brown sugar. I chose to do it this way instead of cutting the butter up because it's being added to heat. And I don't want it to melt completely. I just want it to somewhat melt. I'm going to add that sugar, and we're just going to let that melt. I don't really need to stir it the whole time. As you can see, it's starting to melt. It's not completely melted yet, but the butters melted enough that now I can kind of stir it and break it up. And that'll make it melt faster. Alright, our butter has melted. So now we're going to add our sweet and condensed milk. And our corn syrup. And we want to use a whisk to mix this until it's smooth and the sugar is totally dissolved. We don't want to see any grainy look at all. I have switched to a spoon because everything's dissolved. And this particular spoon also has a thermometer so I can read what the temperature is. And while the recipe doesn't call for a temperature, I like it to be right about the boiling point before I take it off. I'm looking for it to get around 210. Right now it's at 1:24, so I'm going to keep stirring it until it gets there close to the boiling point because I know when it gets right up to that point that everything's going to be nice and dissolved and smooth. You'll notice when I go like this, I have a nice sauce, but I just want to get it a little bit smoother. That is actually looking really, really smooth. Right now, the temperature of the candy is only 142, so I'm probably going to stop when it gets to about 1:50. Because that's looking really smooth. We're not trying to make a candy, that's hard. We are trying to make a sauce, so it doesn't have to be really hot, but we did want it to be really smooth. So when I get it up to 150, I'm going to go ahead and take it off the heat. Alright, as you can see, it looks nice and it just reached 150, so I'm turning off the heat, and we're going to take this over to the cooling rack to cool slightly also. In our next lesson, we will be making the caramel crust. 4. 04 Adding the Caramel Crust: Our caramel sauce has cooled and our crust has cooled. So now we're ready to do what's called the caramel crust. In this pan, I want to pour 6 ounces of caramel sauce, and I want to spread it around. Once I have that spread around, I'm going to sprinkle one half cup a pecans on top of the caramel sauce. And that is the caramel crust. I'm going to do that with both of my pies. With the caramel crust made, we're now going to move on and make the filling for our cheesecake. 5. 05 Making the Batter: We are ready to start making the filling. Now, when I went shopping for the cream cheese, they didn't have the blocks of 8 ounces cream cheese. So I had to buy these tubs instead. And the tub is actually 12 ounces, so I had to do my mouth to get the right amount. So we're going to go ahead and add our cream cheese and our sugar. There's our cream cheese and sugar. I'm just going down a very lost a mix this up. Now I'm going to open that up so I can push that down in. Once I have the sugar I mixed with it, and then I turn that to a high speed, I'm going to mix it for about 5 minutes. Our cheese and sugar has beak for about 5 minutes. We're now going to put the sour cream in. And because I'm doubling the recipe, it's going to be this whole container. Now, I want to beat this in on a low spot. I'm just trying to mix it in. My egg whites, I just lightly mix them like this. I used store bought egg whites, not egg substitute, but actual egg whites. So I'm going to add the egg whites into my mix. I added the egg whites to the mix. And now I'm going to add my eggs. I'm going to turn it off so I can add this better. There's one egg because I'm doubling this, I need four eggs. And there's my fourth egg. I'm now going to add also the lemon zest, the vanilla, and my flour. And since I'm doubling the recipe, it is going to be a fourth of a cup. Now I want to mix that in once I see that flour is pretty much mixed in, I'm going to turn this to medium sleeve. And I'm gonna be it another 3 minutes. I've been 3 minutes. So now, you'll notice how creamy that is. Just go to scrape down the batter. And, of course, I want to taste it at this point. That way, I can make sure I haven't left anything out and that tastes really, really good. 6. 08 Removing Cheesecake From the Pan: We are ready to finish up our turtle cheesecake. This has sat in the fridge overnight. We're going to uncover it, and we're going to release the cheesecake from the pan. I have a parchment paper that's coming up the side of the cheesecake. So I'm peeling that back. With that parchment paper peel back, I'm able to stick my spatula under and I'm going to just go all the way around, make sure it's clean. And then I'm going to lift that cheesecake up and put it on my board. Now, one thing I want to do so that this doesn't slide around. I'm gonna lift that up for just a second. And I'm going to put just a little bit of my caramel sauce on there because it's sticky. And then put my cheesecake back on there. And when I stick that in the fridge, that caramel will become hard and the cheesecake won't slide.