The redemptive cheesecake

After my disastrous coconut cream pie made for New Years, I was searching for a dessert to redeem myself in the kitchen. I feel fully vindicated after baking up this amazing cheesecake. It is from the Tom Douglas cookbook, Seattle Kitchen. While living in Seattle I would occasionally treat myself to a dinner at one of his restaurants (usually when my parents were visiting, it was my starving twenties after all). He is a lover of Seattle and all of its culinary delights and his cookbook is living proof of that love. This is the chevre cheesecake and while it sounds odd to have goat cheese in a cheesecake the result is incredible...not too sweet with enough of a bite to it that gives it great depth of flavor. He calls for blackberries but I worked with what we had and soaked frozen blueberries in lemon juice and sugar for a few hours while the cheesecake cooled.

These are not oreos...

...but they were supposed to be. It's just that I got busy and lazy at the same time. I made up the dough using this recipe, then rolled it into a log to put in the freezer as a cheater's method (see lazy) thinking I would just slice it up and bake it when it got cold. And, I did that, just a day later (see busy). And, the log method made for pretty uneven cookies, some are huge and others are small. They also came out flakier than oreos. I was going for mint oreos so I added peppermint extract to the frosting, which is gorgeous. Actually, the cookies are great, like sophisticated oreos. With the peppermint they seems sort of holiday-ish so could become an annual treat. Maybe add a red swirl to the filling. Hmm. Overall, they were more work than I'm used to with cookies, but nice.

Oh, and side note. Thanks to Elsie Marley for the whole realization that one could make their own oreos and link to TWO essential recipes. Blogland reads my mind sometimes or maybe blogland is actually planting these things in my mind, I don't really know.