Mango Cheesecake

For the longest time, I've had a recipe for mango cheesecake sandwiched between one of my recipe scrapbook pages. I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake (unless my mom makes it; she has a really good non-heavy cheesecake recipe), but the bright yellow color caught my eye. I thus clipped the recipe and added it to my ever-growing pile of to-try-someday-when-the-inspiration-hits recipes.

Pretty though the yellow hue may be, it sat in my recipe pile for a few years for a variety of reasons.
First, the recipe is a Nigella Lawson recipe from the NYT, which typically means that the recipe is very involved. (It was. More on this later.)

Second, her recipes typically call for a lot of butter and sugar (It did.), and not that there's anything wrong with that, but to assuage my guilty conscience, it often means modifying her recipes, which takes a few attempts. I'm not sure I like cheesecake that much to want to try multiple renditions before I declare it edible.

Third, as I mentioned, I'm not overly crazy about cheesecake. Thus, I can't just make this when I'm having people over. I need a party or something to bring it to, so I don't have too many leftovers. (Cheesecake also doesn't freeze well.)

But on this weekend was hot, and I was going to a barbecue birthday celebration in Berkeley, and when I flipped through my recipe pile in search of inspiration, the brilliantly yellow-hued cheesecake jumped out at me. Well, not literally, but still, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try this dessert.

My first mistake was grossly underestimating the amount of cream cheese I needed. I don't really like cream cheese much, so I hardly ever buy it, unless a recipe calls for it. The recipe calls for 1.5 pounds of cream cheese. I thought one package of cream cheese was one pound, so I bought two, thinking I'd have half a container left over. Wrong. I ended up needing another package. That is three packages of cream cheese. More cream cheese than I've bought in the past ten years, mind you. Perhaps this was reason number 4 for not having tried this recipe before.

The graham cracker crust called for a stick of butter. I looked at the 3 packages of cream cheese appallingly and made my first recipe modification. I used a WF whole grain graham cracker recipe, which called for 2 tbsp of butter total and worked perfectly fine as a graham cracker crust.

The recipe calls for a cup of sugar. Second recipe modification: I cut that as well-- but since I was taking it to a barbecue where others were eating it, I didn't cut it as much as I would have were I making this for myself.

The recipe is straightforward enough. (But still very time consuming.) First you make the graham cracker crust, then puree mangoes, mix with the cream cheese (all 3 packages of it), sugar, and 6 eggs. Then it calls for baking it in a water bath for about 2 hours. I was a little skeptical about this, b/c I don't remember my mom ever baking cheesecake in a water bath. Plus, 2 hours of oven time in the heat of summer was just a very long time. Ah well, at this point, I was committed.

2 hours later, the cake came out beautifully. I really wanted to try a sliver to make sure it was fully cooked and also make sure it was edible, but it probably would've looked odd to bring a cheesecake with a gaping hole in it.

The verdict? Well, let me start with a picture of it. It came out looking very impressive and very pretty. Here it is garnished with raspberries. (The raspberries was C's idea.)

Despite the many compliments I received on it, I think I was more impressed with its looks than its taste. I did like it better than a typical cheesecake. It turns out that the water bath steams the cheesecake, which makes it seem deceivingly fluffier/lighter, and also I think helped prevent cracks, which made the above photo op possible.

The mango taste was very subtle-- in fact a little too subtle, for all the time I spent pureeing mangoes.
For the amount of time it took, I wasn't overly wowed by the taste. For this reason, I don't think it is a practical all-purpose or weekday (or even weekend) dessert. However, it does make a good crowd dessert. It has the mango-unusualness factor. It is also very photogenic. It might make a very good alternative to your quotidian pumpkin pie at a thanksgiving gathering.

In the end, I ended up keeping the recipe precisely for that reason.