This, kids, is exactly why garbage like Kraft Ready-to-Eat Cheesecake Filling will never make actual cheesecake.  Real cheesecake is your reward for walking slightly over 2 miles to locate 2 more bricks of cream cheese of 11:30 at night because you realized that you had planned to use the wrong recipe.

This, my friends, is what a real cheesecake looks like.  I can assure you that this did not get glopped into a pre-made graham cracker crust and slopped with blueberry pie filling:

We used the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for New York Cheesecake.

I made a simple blueberry topping from about 6ish oz. frozen blueberries, 1/4 vanilla sugar, 1/4 water, 3 teaspoons lemon juice, a good heavy pinch of lemon zest, a smallish pinch of table salt, and 1 teaspoon arrowroot.  Toss the berries in the sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt while you’re making the cheesecake filling.  Toss into a saucepan with the water.  Add arrowroot and stir around a lot so you don’t have big clumps sitting in your topping.  Add heat.  Cook till thickened and berry sauce looking and let it cool while the cheesecake is baking.

This is probably the best foodgasm I have had in a long ass time.  I almost cried when it came out of the oven.  This was partly because it looked delicious and partly because it was so incredibly easy.  Making a cheesecake makes me really wonder why the hell people don’t make more of their own baked goods.  You can control exactly what goes into them and it’s kind of a big skill to have.  As Libertarian Boyfriend says, cooking is like fucking.  You need to know how to do both, so you might as well get good at them.

I tend to agree with that crude, yet accurate, assessment.

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