Caramel Apple Cheesecake

Yesterday was A's birthday. Usually I am pretty well prepared for it, I spend weeks ahead of time planning presents and meals and cakes. I've made him a poker table cake for one of his previous birthdays:

Can you tell I'm still incredibly proud of it?! Especially back then when I had barely baked anything at all. So I've given myself some high expectations to live up to. This year was particularly stressful since we just came back from KL, so there was hardly any free time to organise things and A had pretty much bought everything he wanted/needed while we were on holiday! I decided to try something more challenging for his cake - caramel apple cheesecake - my first cheesecake! A loves caramel flavoured desserts so I knew he would be a fan of this one. The recipe was quite daunting for me, with four different elements and a huge list of ingredients. But I bought everything well in advance and organised myself pretty well on the night and it turned out pretty damn amazing. Thanks NQN! My kitchen was a disasterous mess afterwards though!

Pouring in the cheesecake filling

Two things that I will fix if I ever do this again: 1. more apple filling (I think that my crappy Coles apples were too small), 2. More foil!!! Evil water got through the foil and into the springform tin so that the edge was all gooey. Luckily it all held together and the water didn't seep in too much.

Fresh out of the oven

After sitting in the fridge overnight

It turned out quite pretty, even with all the water issues and the issues with my stupid oven coils. I made the butterscotch sauce the next day, after we returned from brunch. We ended up going for yum cha at kam fook, chatswood. It's still my favourite yum cha place, it is always consistent. I know a lot of people who now prefer Zilver in Chinatown but it failed to impress me when I tried it a couple of months ago. It was a miserable, cold and rainy day, so yum cha and warm butterscotch sauce on cheesecake were the perfect comfort food.

Pouring the butterscotch sauce...

Tada!

I had a bit of cream cheese and vanilla/cinnamon sugar sauce left over from the cake making process and I was feeling guilty about not being able to feed A the cake straight after baking it, so I used the leftovers and made cream cheese french toast with bananas and vanilla/cinnamon sauce on top:

Ooh it was so yum, I couldn't resist having a few bites myself. So now I've managed to fatten both of us up significantly (just wait til you hear what we had for dinner after that cheesecake) and will not be eating for another decade. Instead I will be wistfully flicking through the amazingly pretty, gold-leafed pages of the new patisserie book A ordered for me from the bookstore

So I pretty much want to make every single thing in it.