Cheesecake 101

Raspberries are on!!!! Found some beautiful ripe red babies last night in my own front yard--just look at the pic to the left...these are my own ruby-beauties! This calls for Cheesecake for Jim's office! As you all know, I love to cook, but do not eat a lot of what I cook...this is a good case-in-point! Although I love it, it's not good for me and I'd rather have a leg of rotisserie chicken from Sam's Club, or a hunk of cheese than a slice of this decadent dessert. I've been making this recipe since we lived in Los Alamos back in 1990...the REAL recipe is Mexican Marble Cheesecake from the Rincon del Oso Restaurant in Santa Fe and it incorporates Mexican Chocolate for a marbled effect...(Santa Fe Recipe ISBN 0-9622807-0-4--all the greatest recipes from all the greatest restaurants in Santa Fe, NM) hmm....chocolate and raspberries..I should rethink this. This is a dense cheesecake, which I prefer to that mushy kind of pudding thing. Today I am more interested in incorporating this great recipe with our lovely ripe wild raspberries and am leaving out the Mexican Chocolate the real recipe calls for.

Here we go...

1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs

1/4 cup sugar

6 TBSP melted Butter

1 tsp water

24 ounces cream cheese, softened (that's 4 of those 8 oz packages)

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

3 TBSP flour

2 TBSP heavy cream

1 tsp. vanilla

1/4 tsp. almond extract

Combine graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter in a bowl and mix with a fork. Press this into a buttered 9" springform pan. Bake in preheated oven (350) for 10 minutes and let cool.

In a medium bowl place the remaining ingredients and mix well. Pour this onto your crust. Preheat the oven to 450 and cook for 10 minutes, now lower the heat to 250 and cook for 25-30 more minutes (until it is set). Chill before serving....I'm serving mine with those lovely raspberries heated with some sugar spread over the top.