Goat!

Today we got together to celebrate a friend's (belated) birthday over dinner. This friend happens to be someone who made me gluten-free hamburgers (buns and patties!) from scratch, so the pressure was on to make something nice in return. Buddy made a lovely (and very spicy) pumpkin curry from the gourds we'd gotten from our farm share the last couple of weeks. And I made cheesecake. A very dense, heavy, and rich cheesecake. So much so that I am dreading the leftovers in my fridge.

Who doesn't love cheesecake? Apparently Buddy doesn't, but he was gracious enough to serve and eat the darn thing. I got the recipe out of a little Nestlé brochure that incorporates one Nestlé product or another into every single recipe it has. (I wished I had a comparable brochure for Campbell's.) In order to complicate things, I decided to use half cream cheese and half goat cheese...and maple syrup instead of sugar...but other than that I did not have any strange substitutions. ::Whew::

Here is what happened: I took a bunch of (14 or so?) gluten-free chocolate cookie sandwiches (kind of like Oreos) and scraped off the frosting bit. (I did not eat the remaining frosting...though I really wanted to. Until I ate one. And then I didn't.) Then I crushed up the cookies, added some lemon-flavored olive oil and some maple syrup, pressed it into a glass pie dish, and stuck in the fridge. Crust done.

Next I took 8 oz. each of cream and goat cheeses (that had been sitting out on the kitchen counter for a while) and beat them up. Then I added about a 1/4 cup of maple syrup and 2 eggs. Then I melted some white chocolate chips (about 6 oz.?) over warm water and mixed it into the cheese. In went the vanilla extract. Then everything into the prepared chocolate crust. Thirty minutes at 375 ºF, and out came a (little bit too) browned goat cheese cake. (I didn't have any raspberries, so blackberries had to do for garnish.)

I think it was OK. It really was too rich, and I felt sick after my 45º piece. The red wine made it tolerable, but I really do wonder what the heck happened to make it so heavy. ::sigh::

Speaking of which, I am feeling very sleepy at the moment and am impressed that I remember the cooking steps so darn clearly. I heard that Asian people (and their livers) process alcohol differently, and that that's why we get such a thing as "Asian flush"...I wonder if that explains why I always get sleepy so much more easily than other people do at dinner parties...