My Cheesecake Adventure

Since this week is my week for Supper Club, I decided to make a dessert ahead of time for tonight's dinner. So last night I picked up all of the ingredients for the cheesecake:

3 - 8 ounce cream cheese
lemon
orange
sugar
1 tsp of vanilla extract
graham crackers
2 cups oatmeal
13 tablespoons of butter
heavy whipping cream

And set out to make my first cheesecake! I started with the crust; heating the two cups of oatmeal until it turned a darker brown. Then I added all of the butter, and 1 cup of sugar. Once that was all mixed I spread it out on the bottom of the pan:



Then I put the pan (and little baby cup - for tasting later) in the frig to cool. After, I started the filling. I combined the cream cheese, lemon zest, lemon juice, orange zest, and sugar into one mixing bowl:



As you can see in the picture, there are huge orange specks- I have learned that I need to invest in a grader because it was nearly impossible to chop up the orange peels fine enough, and I got to the 'screw it' point - so basically there are large chunks of orange peel in the cheesecake - ugh fantastic. After I couldn't do anything about that, I moved on to the 'whipping part'. So I started whipping the cream which as it turns out, not that easy! My arm was going to fall off after about 30 mins of doing this. I got to the 'screw it' part of this and put all of it into the cream cheese mixture. Also - need to invest in whisk, because I had to use a fork, which DID NOT work.



After I stirred it enough, and got it to the point where it wasn't 'as lumpy' as the picture showed, I poured it into the pan with crust:



What I learned:

1. CANNOT improvise certain kitchen tools
2. I hate whipping