When I asked my mom what dessert she wanted for Mother’s Day this year, she got very excited about the idea of cheesecake which got me excited too! I love making cheesecakes but I haven’t made one in a while. They are also one of my favorite desserts! Cheesecake is actually a pretty simple bake but you can’t rush your process because you can really mess up the texture from over baking it or over mixing it or end up with massive cracks, from cooling it quickly.

My mom and I did a lot of baking when I was a kid and she was my first influence into the joy of baking and cooking. I wanted to do something special for her, not simply my typical New York cheesecake (which is an amazing cake) and so I started to search for a new recipe I’d never made before. I found a few intriguing options right away – a cinnamon roll cheesecake and a peach cobbler cheesecake. Both of these sounded amazing but then I remembered that my mom and cinnamon are not the best of friends and so I knew I had to keep looking. Then I came across a delicious looking caramel toffee cheesecake and after reviewing the recipe I knew I had found it!

As I mentioned, I love making cheesecakes and I’ve made a lot of them through the years. They are a pretty basic base recipe and then you add the ingredients that make the recipe unique (like caramel and toffee). As I was looking over this one, my gut was telling me I needed to make some changes to be more in line with my base recipe but I decided to follow it as it was written. In the end, I wish I had gone with my gut! Don’t get me wrong, it still turned out delicious but my mom and I had fun figuring out what would have made it even better

We thought the crust overshadowed the cheesecake and was overly sweet for our tastes. Next time, and there will definitely be a next time, I will make a more traditional graham cracker base and just sprinkle toffee over that, instead of mixing the toffee in with the crackers and then adding a separate layer of melted chocolate. The cheesecake had some homemade caramel sauce in it and that was a winner! So delicious but next time, I’ll use a little more cream cheese than what the recipe called for. We like a bit thicker cheesecake and so my base cake always uses at least four 8 oz. packages of cream cheese and this one only called for three. The topping was an incredible mixture of caramel sauce and toffee, and I wouldn’t change a thing (expect next time I will make the whipped cream and use it as a garnish – I just had some store bought stuff I needed to use up!)

All in all, this cheesecake was a real hit. Even though I’ll make changes next time, we all loved it. Most importantly, my mom loved it. I love baking for my family, especially my mom!

Baked May 2022