What better way to kick off this blog than with delicious, over-the-top birthday goodies? It always feels like birthdays are a great time to go all out, and that’s what I have been doing for Ilya (the hubs) this year. When I initially presented suggestions to him for what he might like me to make, I posed ideas for a peanut butter-style cheesecake and a salted caramel cheesecake (he is a hard core lover of all things salted caramel and peanut butter-chocolate is a favorite flavor combo of his). He couldn’t decide so I did what any good wife would do and made both! His birthday fell on a Wednesday (August 6th) this year, so he lucked out and got 2 weekends of celebrating. Last weekend I made this amazing, delicious confection, a brownie-bottomed salted caramel cheesecake:
This cheesecake was born out of a couple different pinterest recipes I found, with modifications. I couldn’t find, specifically, a “brownie-bottomed salted caramel cheesecake” recipe that used a homemade brownie. So I dug around and found a plain brownie-bottomed cheesecake which I used for the brownie recipe, and then combined that with a modified version of a caramel sauce recipe and cheesecake recipe I found. First off: variations. The recipe in the aforementioned link is just for regular caramel sauce, so for my salted caramel sauce, I used that recipe, but for the caramels I used 14oz of these salted caramels purchased from Trader Joe’s:
However, since Ilya likes his caramel super-salted, these weren’t quite salty enough for him, so I also added in some fresh ground sea salt into my sauce as well. Naturally, I went overboard (something I often do when adding in ingredients on the fly) and it was way too salty, so then I had to compensate with some added sugar. In the end it tasted great, though! The combined, Meredithized version of the recipe is here. The list of ingredients/instructions make it look daunting, but it honestly wasn’t that bad. The only real issue I had was with the caramel being unevenly distributed in the end, but that seemed to have been due to an issue with the caramel sauce not having cooled enough prior to my spreading the cheesecake batter on top. My recipe explains how to hopefully avoid that issue.
The same night I made the deliciously amazing aforementioned cheesecake, I also made Ilya a birthday dinner per his request. Wegmans Wokery buffet has a “creamy shrimp” that we both love and never find at any Chinese restaurants. However, their lo mein is not our favorite. By the way, if you don’t know what Wegmans is, I am sorry. So very sorry. It is a wonderful oasis of grocery store meats specialty cheese/bread/prepared foods shop meets a little slice of heaven. Anyhow, I digress… so Ilya requested that I make the creamy shrimp and some homemade lo mein. Sure thing, I say! Challenge accepted! It was difficult to find a recipe that seemed right, because there didn’t seem to be anything out there that looked quite the same. Ultimately I went with a recipe I found which was absolutely delicious, however not the same as Wegmans and lacked that certain flavor we were going for.
This recipe was far from my favorite to make, as I hate dealing with raw seafood so that instantly made put it lower on the list. Also, I had some trouble with the walnuts (I never did get them right, I just gave up and used them as they turned out the second time around). It sure did taste good, but again…was missing that certain something I was goig for. So tomorrow I am trying out a different recipe that I think should be closer (fingers crossed). It uses coconut cream and the photo from the recipe’s website looks closer to the Wegmans shrimp.
Underneath the shrimp is the homemade lo mein I made, which I adapted from a recipe found on Pinterest. For mine, I didn’t include mushrooms, but added in snow peas and cabbage, and extra of the other ingredients. Then, because I was using more veggies, the noodle/sauce quantities were off. So basically I changed all the quantities. What resulted was a LOT of lo mein, but that’s what we wanted, so it worked out. If, however, you don’t plan on eating lo mein leftovers for days, you should probably use the 8 oz linguine as the original recipe called for. Also, I really like caramelized onions. In general and definitely in lo mein. So I opted to caramelize the onion for the lo mein. Because the flavor is exponentially better than using a regular onion, I’m modifying the recipe to call specifically for those, but you could always use plain old onion if you want (or no onion at all if you don’t like them/can’t eat them).
And now, we are up to this weekend’s birthday goodies. There’s a funny trend in Ilya’s family where everybody has a “birthday buddy.” i.e. There are 2 people with birthdays right around the same time, typically within days of each other, for every set of people in the family. So we celebrate double time! Ilya’s birthday buddy is his grandfather, Felya. Tonight was the celebration for their birthdays and this was when I busted out the recipes for the brownie-bottomed peanut butter cheesecakes. There were 2 varieties that stood out to us but neither of us could choose which one seemed best, so naturally I made both.
These were both all kinds of amazing. They each differed slightly in their own delicious way. Ilya gave the top a 10 out of 10 and the bottom an 11 out of 10. After due diligence research, I do believe I concur with his assessment, though I would still gladly eat either of them. The top recipe looked to be the harder of the two for some reason, though this did not end up being the case. I followed the directions to the T, applying all of my beloved cheesecake tips and it all worked out beautifully. As the source of the recipe indicated, though, there is more cheesecake batter than will fit in the pan on top of the brownie (assuming you use the entire brownie batter, which I did). I made a bit more room by pressing the chocolate chips/peanut butter chips and chopped up peanut butter cups down into the brownie a bit, though there was still no way all that cheesecake batter was going to fit. Have no fear, though. Just throw the rest of the batter into a greased up pan and bake it off with some chocolate chips, peanut butter chips and chopped up peanut butter cups on top and you basically get a mini, crust-less version of the cheesecake. The crust on this one becomes very hard (once the chocolate and peanut butter chips and peanut butter cups cool), so it is a tough one to cut, though I did fine with my large knife, running under super hot water and wiping clean before every slice. The recipe for this one is here).
And lastly, for variety No. 2 of the brownie-bottomed peanut butter cheesecake (on the bottom in the above photo and recipe here). This one gave me a bit of trouble on several counts. The first brownie crust I made, I baked even longer than the website said to but as the recipe cautioned not to overbake the brownie, I was concerned and removed it from the oven/cooled it when it was not done. Since this recipe does not bake the brownie further with the cheesecake filling, it’s imperative that the brownie be fully cooked when you remove it from the oven. So when I made the do-over, I baked it for closer to 45 minutes and it was perfect; done but not overdone, moist and delicious. The other problem I had was with assembly, namely in transferring the cheesecake layer from the springform pan onto the peanut butter-frosted brownie crust. I believe this may be because I used more peanut butter cups than the recipe called for, and did not really press them down into the batter. The cheesecake ended up breaking in several places which made it very difficult to maneuver. Also, my springform pan is designed a bit strangely where, if you want to run a knife under the cheesecake, it’s not really possible because the pan dips down in. So if you were to slide your knife in, you’d be slicing partway through the crust. Very odd…and not how the springform pan I borrowed from a coworker is designed (I needed 2 pans for this crazy cheesecake-baking adventure!). Hers is designed must more intelligently, and I am going to get myself a new pan like that one. Ultimately, though, I was able to get everything together and, as previously mentioned, this one was the winner of the peanut butter cup cheesecake duel. It was just so creamy and the brownie was so gooey and delicious and that peanut butter frosting! Mmmmmmm.
Phew!! In all honestly, none of this was really that bad to make, but it sure seems exhausting just reading/detailing it all! It probably helps that I enjoy cooking and baking as much as I do, otherwise it probably would have seemed a lot worse! Tomorrow will be the end of the line for Ilya’s birthday foods. I will be making the lo mein recipe from above for lunch with a peanut chicken recipe (to be posted tomorrow) and then for dinner I will be trying out the creamy shrimp recipe I found that uses coconut cream and seems like it should be closer to the Wegmans recipe. We shall see!