Cheesecake Recipes & More From Cheesecakes To Go

What’s your favorite birthday cake? For me, nothing beats cheesecake. In fact, I can’t imagine what the world was like before cheesecake was created!Turns out, you’d have to search back pretty far to find a time when the Earth was cheesecake free. In fact, way back in 776 BC, long before the first Cheesecake Factory opened, the Greeks are said to have served cheesecake to the athletes at the first Olympic games. The Romans soon caught on and spread the divine taste of cheesecake throughout Europe. From there it was only a matter of time before European immigrants brought their cherished cheesecake recipes to America.

It seems that every region of the globe has embraced cheesecake in one form or another, adapting the recipe to local tastes and adding local flavors. In America, cheesecakes are typically made with a cream cheese base, but even here we vary the recipe by region. New York cheesecake is famous for its ultra-smooth texture and decadently rich flavor– achieved by adding extra egg yolks and a hint of lemon – and you’ll find other regional variations from Chicago-style to Pennsylvania Dutch. Many American bakers add sour cream for a creamy cheesecake that can be frozen without compromising taste or texture.

Italian cheesecakes generally use ricotta cheese, which makes them drier than their American cousins. The French prefer Neufchatel cheese and often add gelatin for a light and airy consistency. The Greeks might use ricotta, mizithra, farmers, feta, Swiss, or a combination of cheeses, while the Germans typically rely on cottage cheese or quark. The Japanese incorporate cornstarch and whipped egg whites into their cheesecakes for a more custard-like effect, and I’ve even heard you can find cheesecake in vending machines in Japan. Now why didn’t I think of that?

You’d be hard pressed to find a culture that doesn’t – or didn’t – enjoy a good cheesecake. Culinary historians cite cheesecake recipes dating back to the first century AD, with additional recipes floating around from the centuries that followed. You’ll find every imaginable flavor and topping in today’s cheesecake recipes, but the basic premise, baking creamy cheese with wheat and sweetener, has stood the test of time.

And let’s not forget savory cheesecakes featuring blue cheese, garlic, seafood, chiles, and other tasty cheese-friendly flavors, or vegan versions of cheesecake-like desserts made with tofu. With so many varieties, you’d need a lot more than a “Cheesecake of the Month” club to sample them all!

Clearly, cheesecake has lived long and continues to prosper. Whether it’s a birthday cake, anniversary treat, or just a “Make-Everyday-Special” indulgence, cheesecake is an ancient delight that will never go out of style!

Deirdre von Ansbach was a delightful piece of work. In the best and most outrageous tradition of Mame’s Agnes Gooch, she had lived. She quit walking down the aisle once she acquired a “von” in her last name. She took on airs, as some might say (and some did). But she had a regal aura from the time she could walk. To be sure, her doting parents treated her like a little princess. They didn’t have much in the way of money but when it came to creating charming little gifts out of nothing, they excelled. They found new uses for paper scribbled on just one side. For vines and shrunken apples folded in on themselves. For stones and rocks. For sipping straws “liberated” from an ice cream parlor. Even from spent toothpaste tubes from which absolutely nothing more could be squeezed, even with the help of a vise. With glue, wire, paper clips, string, an old jelly glass, a spool of thread minus the thread, a cracked dish, Deirdre’s parents delighted her with surprise combinations of shape and texture.Her gift to them was excelling in school, earning spending money by designing and making clothes for her friends with enough left over to create stunning outfits for herself. Two or three times a week, she prepared scrumptious meals topped off with desserts, artistic creations that melted in the mouth. Before she was thirty, she had her own line of clothing (the label read simply, “Deirdre”) and a major corporation had purchased her recipes for three desserts – glorious cheesecakes – that could be found in the frozen food section. She was rich. Very, very rich. She traveled extensively, enlarging her circle of acquaintances, discovering new sources for exotic fabrics, new styling ideas, and new husbands but after the “von,” she dallied only with new lovers. She not only burned the candle at both ends, she melted it in the middle. For decades she led a merry chase of a life until the afternoon she wondered if she were having a heart attack.

When she presented herself at a hospital’s emergency room and mentioned chest pains, she was whisked through triage and hooked up for an EKG and wheeled to a bed within a curtained space where her forearm was prepared to receive an IV, should that become necessary. Within seconds, she was breathing oxygen and hooked to a heart monitor. Vials of blood were rushed to the lab. One by one, attendants, nurses, interns, doctors, even a hospitality representative, parted a curtain enough to enter into her allotted space. Her medical history was taken. Everyone with a stethoscope listened to her chest, her back, even her ankles. Everyone said, “Describe what happened” and everyone asked, “Are you having any pain?” She wasn’t and she was beginning to feel like a ninny. The medical consensus was to admit her, keep her overnight.

Once she was ensconced in a room in the cardiac wing, she asked that her assistant whom she had abandoned in the waiting room be allowed to come to her bedside. When the unctuous Randolph strode the wide hallway, resplendent in velvet slacks and a sharkskin jacket festooned with a wild print on a silk scarf, eyebrows shot up, jaws dropped, eyes blinked. Deirdre rattled off whispered directions to Randolph who nodded understanding, swiveled and marched out into the hallway, vowing, “I shall return!” and then he immediately destroyed the calculated MacArthur illusion with a naughty wink. An orderly standing near a supply closet tingled all over.

Within an hour, delivery trucks snarled the parking apron that flanked the main entrance. Led by Randolph, a flotilla of off-loaders carrying large domed trays and towers of shiny lime green boxes emblazoned with a golden D overwhelmed the staff’s protests that patients were restricted to only two visitors. “My dear woman,” Randolph said, “we’re calling on every patient on the floor!” Deirdre bored almost to tears by what seemed to have been the heart attack that never was, clapped her hands with glee and decreed that her famous cheesecake tarts garnished with fruit or syrups or whipped cream were to be presented to everyone in the cardiac wing – patients, staff, visitors – and that everyone was also to receive a lasting souvenir of her visit – one of her unrestrained prints woven into oversized square scarves. Nurses at the hub of the floor where they monitored the vital signs of certain patients were alarmed by a succession of rapid beeps but which subsided quickly, replaced by the steady rhythms of relaxed and healing hearts, made happy by colorful shimmering scarves and the pleasure of digesting delectable cheesecakes as smooth as the silky scarves.

– Scarlet O’Cheesecake

Aideen Cassidy had never set foot in Ireland but if she had, she could have been a poster maid for the Emerald Isle. The faintest auburn freckles seemed to be covered with a watery film of skin as white as skimmed milk with nary a touch of cream. Her wide-set pale blue eyes, clear and bright, were framed by fine lashes shades darker than her burnished mane of golden browns and reds, as if tinted by hair coloring labeled “tortoise shell.” She was tall, slender, and at 20, still more girl than woman.

She was a dreamer who did as she was told, who never made waves. She was a loyal friend to any who fell into her presence but she was not gregarious. She didn’t sleepwalk through school; she drifted. She wished she had goals but ambition was not indigenous to her character. Her parents loved her but made no demands on her. “There’s no hurry,” was their attitude. “Aideen will discover her passion in her own good time.” Secretly they were relieved that so far, passion had not blossomed into a romance. In the meantime, they savored her baking skills, especially the cheesecakes she surprised them with two or three times a month.

After high school when most of her classmates went away to college, Aideen tried a succession of jobs as receptionist, waitress, mother’s helper, sales clerk, nanny, short-order cook, dog-walker, personal shopper. She was dependable, competent, pleasant, and all her employers hated to see her go. “Come back, any time,” they said. “You’ve always got a job here!”

Then it happened. At about the same time her friends were receiving their college degrees, her interest was piqued by a talk show guest who waxed poetic about the benefits of winning a lottery. The winner rattled off the obvious advantages of buying a home for mom, travel, new car, but the most appreciated perk was the luxury of weekly massages. Aideen spent hours at her computer researching massage. She contacted area schools who offered accredited courses. While reading through their literature, one in particular appealed to her. She enrolled. Almost a year later, a fully licensed massage therapist, she was hired by a local gym where she had a massage table in a secluded room, low light, oils, scented candles, music of waterfalls, ocean waves, birdsong as in effect, an oasis. When the appointment book was clear, she wheeled her portable chair to the lobby and offered 15-minute shoulder massages. Thus word of her “healing touch” spread. Repeat customers included chiropractors, one in particular, tall and gangly, who after five years in practice, had attracted a large patient base. When he asked her how she happened to become a therapist, he saw a pleasant young woman become a beauty. She glowed as she spoke of the caring tenderness she felt for each body she touched, regardless of their appearance, because, “I feel a connection with their inner being. I can’t explain it,” she said. “I want to help them.” By showing Aideen how to reconfigure her hours at the gym, she agreed to join his practice six hours a week.

Do you think you know where this story is going? You’re wrong if you think she fell in love with the chiropractor. Her heart was captured by the owner of the gym, a burly fellow with a tension catchall near his right shoulder that she worked on, repeatedly, until it disappeared at about the same time he realized that Aideen had a way of making him feel good all over. When she brought in one of her home baked cheesecakes, he was a goner. Of course he married her! And he had a special chilled show case made to fit in with the other show cases at the lobby’s welcoming counter. There, along with power snacks and drinks, sweat bands, step monitors, t-shirts and sweat pants, is a small case that features Aideen’s cheesecakes, sold by the slice whose main ingredient is love.

Scarlet O’Cheesecake

Aunt Myrtie couldn’t bake her way out of a paper bag (not to coin a phrase) but she pulled a rabbit (culinary triumph) out of three chilled, styrofoam containers. Best of all, no one was the wiser. Who among us does not admire ingenuity?

The custom at family holiday feasts was to pass a hat just before dessert was served in which had been placed slips of paper, enough for everyone to choose one. There were two that read, “hors d’oeuvres,” but all the rest were single listings – “meat,” “salad,” “two vegetables,” “bread/rolls,” “wine,” “beverage,” “dessert.,” and “ice cream.” Within this family, ice cream was considered its own food group. Whoever drew what from the hat was responsible for bringing that dish to the next family feast. Theoretically, no one was supposed to tell anyone what they were bringing. There were also assignments for KP and blank pieces of paper so that occasionally, some could gloat about how relaxing it was to be a guest.

Aunt Myrtie’s paper said, “Dessert.” For years she had dodged this bullet. But now, here it was, in black and white – her nemesis. Blood drained from her face. She brought her wine glass to her lips and drained it. She had three months to come up with a palatable dessert. She downed another glass of wine.

Every week, she experimented. That is, she leafed through cookbooks and followed recipes. But no matter how explicit the directions, regardless of how meticulously she measured, how she stirred if it said stir, or folded, or beat, or melted or chilled, her efforts never set, fell apart, or hardened like a rock. She exhausted the possibilities in her cookbooks and turned to the Internet. What a plethora of possibilities! Her adventurous spirit revived. But the results? Disaster followed catastrophe. Her spirit sagged.

“There is no joy in cooking!” she cried.

By six days before the holiday feast, she was desperate. She trolled the ‘net. And then, because she was a good woman, the dessert gods smiled on her, steering her to a site that offered not recipes to ruin but a solution to her deficiency in the dessert department: ready-to-eat cheesecake, shipped over night to your home, packaged so that by the time it was to be served, it was at the perfect temperature. She would pull the same trick she had as a bride: she would slide the cheesecake like she had slid apple pie into one of her own glass baking dishes and no one would be the wiser. She ordered one cheesecake as an experiment. She managed to transfer it into a glass baking dish but not even tons of raspberries could camouflage what appeared to be earthquake damage.

The dessert gods smiled on her again. “A ha!” she exclaimed. She ordered three more cheesecakes. She visited the florist and came home with a dozen irises.

Before she went to bed that night, she dug out large glass platters she hadn’t used in years, washed them carefully in hot soapy water, rinsed them well, and dried them with tea towels, rubbing until the glass glistened, and set them on the dining room table along with a short stack of small doilies. She prepared four glass bowls and a small pitcher, set them on the table, and went to bed. The irises stood tall in a vase. She was confident the cheesecakes would arrive by mid-afternoon.

And they did – classic New York style cheesecakes, pristine in a foam container protected within a corrugated box. Did she attempt to transfer them to a glass container? Aunt Myrtie may not have been a natural baker but she was not stupid! She cut the cheesecakes into individual serving pieces, placing each one on a doily, and then onto the platters. She placed iris blossoms among the cheesecakes, elevating the platters to works of art. In the bowls were garnishes – raspberries, strawberries, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and a small pitcher of a coffee liqueur. Aunt Myrtie refilled the whipped cream bowl once and the pitcher seven times. If she picked “dessert” from the hat again, she knew exactly what she would serve: brownies re-named “crumble delight” served with coffee liqueur and whipped cream.

– Scarlet O’Cheesecake

Jeff’s obsession with Susanna began on their first day in the First Grade. He was skinny and gangly. She reminded him of the elfin princesses who flitted across the pages of picture books; she was delicate, graceful. By high school, Susanna was the poster child for dewy, ethereal beauty. Now all the boys worshiped her. Sometimes in the hallways, when Jeff said, “Hello, Susanna,” she responded with a casualness Jeff interpreted as, “Oh, it’s only Jeff.” He was resigned to being just another face in Susanna’s gallery of admirers and so he dated girls who were pretty but not gorgeous, girls who giggled and ran across fields, who dove into the lake and raced him to the raft, who ping-ponged ideas with him, exuding a charm that fostered friendship and occasionally lingering goodnight kisses. But, he yearned for Susanna.

At the Senior Prom, when the chaperones decided the dancing had become too dangerously romantic, they insisted everyone change partners, “Now!” Fate had positioned Jeff and his date next to Susanna and her date. Suddenly Jeff’s arms were around a creature with gossamer wings who floated across the dance floor, who swayed with him, who seemed to become one with him and the music. The chaperones signaled the orchestra to stop. “Change partners!” the chaperones shouted. Jeff never slowed down. He whirled Susanna around the room. She tilted back her head and looked at the person to whom she had yielded control. “Why,” she marveled, “it’s Jeff from the First Grade!” The orchestra resumed playing. The chaperones shrugged. Jeff danced as if he had channeled Fred Astaire. When the music ended, Susanna said, “Hi, Jeff.” They kissed. The chaperones were apoplectic. Jeff returned Susanna to her partner, bowed, and said, “Thank you, Susanna..” Then he turned, found his date, swept her into his arms, and created the evening’s second belle of the ball.

Jeff heard that Susanna was engaged two or three times while in college and after graduating, she landed an entry level job in retail merchandising. Jeff went directly into graduate school, earned an MBA, and was hired by a major airline. He was dating Amy and had fallen in like with her but the ghost of Susanna, the possibility of her, blocked him from falling in love.

Seven years after the Senior Prom, he swung into a gas station and pulled into the self-serve line behind a blue convertible where a knockout in a pale blue sweater and white slacks stood pumping her own gas. Jeff said, “Susanna, hello.”

Within seconds she exclaimed, “Jeff! My favorite dancing partner!”

His innards lurched.

They spent the next two hours in a deli where they ordered cheesecake and coffee. “Ummm,” Susannah said, “This cheesecake is delicious,” and she took her second bite. They talked about their jobs (Susannah was a buyer; Jeff was a division comptroller), their interests (Susanna’s was fashion; Jeff’s ran the gamut from A (art) to Y (yoga). “This is the best cheesecake I ever tasted,” Susanna said, after eating less than half during the previous hour, one small nibble at a time. Into the second hour and third coffee refill, Jeff’s interest in Susanna was replaced by his fascination with how long she took to finish eating one piece of cheesecake. He marveled that anyone deliberately created ultra-small pieces and then ate a mere morsel so slowly and talked about only one subject – clothes. Back at their cars, Susannah and Jeff exchanged cards. “I’d love to hear from you,” she cooed.

“All these years,” Jeff thought, “I was smitten by Susannah’s beauty because what else was there? Not much!” He stifled a laugh. “I’m glad I saw you, Susannah.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run,” he said, and so avoided lying that he’d call her soon because now there was only one girl he wanted to call. He sped away and touched speed dial on his cell phone.

“Hello? Amy?”

– Scarlet O’Cheesecake