Mom's Cheese Cake

This is a family favorite! I love this cheesecake, it has the right balance between sweet, tart and sublime! This is my mom's recipe and it is absolutely fantastic! She makes it as a sheet cake, so there are plenty of pieces to go around!

I find this cake stands on its own, you really don't need any additional sauces for it. If you want to get fancy, you could put boil a few strips of lemon in syrup or sugary water for a few minutes to give it a bit more zing! Or you could put a few fresh strawberries on the cake. Or make a strawberry rose sauce and drizzle that over the cake. Or fresh blueberries...the possibilities are endless.

The only addition that I made to my mom's recipe is that I added some cardamon to the crust, which gave it a wonderful flavor!

Crust
2 cups graham crackers, crushed
1 stick melted butter (1/4 lbs or 4 oz)
Cardamon (optional)

Filling
3 eight oz packages of cream cheese, room temperature
5 eggs, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
dash of salt

Topping
1 pint sour cream
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tsp vanilla


Crust
Mix graham crackers and melted butter and press into the bottom of a 9x13 inch pan, making sure to cover the whole pan.

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream Cheese Filling
Remove cream cheese and butter from refrigerator and bring to room temperature.

Once the cream cheese and the butter have come to room temperature, cream with an electric mixer until smooth. I made mine with the Kitchen Aid Electric Mixer, which worked wonderful!

Add eggs, one at a time, making sure to beat the eggs into the batter thoroughly, before adding the next egg. You want to have this mixture be extremely smooth, so I usually let the Kitchen Aid go at it for several minutes.

At first the cream cheese will stick and clump around the mixer. Don't worry about it and let it keep on mixing! You can periodically scrape off some of the cream cheese from the wires and add it back into the mix.


After a while the batter should look something like this. Once it gets to this consistency, add the sugar, vanilla and salt and beat until well blended.
















Assembly
Pour the cream cheese filling onto of the graham cracker crust and spread evenly. Use a gentle hand, because you don't want the spatula to touch the crust, otherwise the graham cracker crust will get into and mix with the filling. You will be putting frosting over this layer, so if some gets mixed up, its not the end of the world (see the bottom right corner to see where I messed up!)









Pop in the oven and bake at 350 for 35 minutes.
Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes.
Increase the oven temperature to 450 and wait till the oven comes up to temperature. 
















Topping
While the oven is heating up to 450, beat sour cream, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Set aside.






















After 5 minutes of cooling, spread the sour cream topping evenly on the top layer of the cake. See, it takes care of that little mess we had at the bottom right corner!

Bake an additional 5 minutes at 450.







The finished product should look relatively smooth:















I usually will let it come down to room temperature and pop it in the fridge to serve cold.

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