Wedding Cheesecakes

After a few months of planning and making practice batches of cheesecakes, performance day finally arrived!

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, let me explain...

My cousin William got married a few weekends ago and they asked me a few months before to make cheesecakes for them instead of a traditional wedding cake. As soon as John heard this, his first comment was that he saw a lot of practice cheesecake in our future...

He was right.

Although I'm decently good(ish) at making cheesecakes (yeah, I'm super confident about it... lol.), I wanted to make sure I had it down enough that I wouldn't end up accidentally making a not so good batch when the time came for the wedding cheesecakes.

The biggest thing I learned when making practice batches was to never use our downstairs oven. I'm pretty sure it gets about 100 degrees over what it's set at every time...

Along with that, I also found a lot of amazing tips on a website called The Kitchn as well as a perfect recipe for cheesecake. After reading all the tips and trouble shooting hints, there should be no way to mess up this cheesecake recipe if you follow the directions. It makes a rich and creamy cheesecake every time!

For the large cheesecake, I followed the recipe listed above but made a raspberry sauce to swirl into the top. I made this by putting about 6 oz of raspberries in a blender, straining out the seeds, and adding sugar to taste. After that, I just poured some of the sauce on the top in a spiral and then used a skewer to swirl it a little more.

To make the mini cheesecakes, I used this same recipe, but added sugar to the crust (just personal preference). I also found that it made enough for about 36 cupcake sized cheesecakes! Which meant one less batch when it came down to making them for the wedding!

To decorate the mini cheesecakes, the bride asked for strawberries on top. I wanted to give them a little height, so I made a whipped cream frosting (basically just stabilized whipped cream) for the top using a recipe from a blog called Baking a Moment. I then topped that with a small slice of strawberry and they were good to go!

I was planning on using the same cupcake stand I used for my sister in law Amanda's wedding, buuut... it got knocked over and shattered... on the first day of my baking for the wedding. Not a good start. We scrambled a little after that and I was able to come up with something that worked just as well (with the help of my favorite store once again... the D.I. thrift store. Haha!).

Here I am setting up the cheesecakes. And thanks to my Dad for taking all the pictures! They turned out great!

Also, I'm 5 months pregnant in that picture... 

Not sure how my shirt hid that so well! Haha!

And here's my cute little nephew enjoying the cheesecakes at the reception!

And finally... the happy couple!

Overall, it turned out great! I think there will always be something I think I could've done better (like not shattering the cupcake stand 2 days before the wedding...), but that just means I'm still learning, which is a big part of what life's all about. That being said, I'm glad it's all done! And I probably won't be making cheesecake for quite a while! At least until next year some time... we'll see where my cravings take me. Haha!