Cheesecake Day

Last Saturday I attended a cheesecake baking class at The Maya Kitchen. I was really nervous because the last time I attended a cooking class was in high school. I wasn't really fond of the kitchen, much less getting pressured to cook with others. I learned how to cook out of necessity (cook or starve!) when I got married, but I have never cooked outside my kitchen.

Anyway, my fears were soon abated when I realized that we were not going to have a hands-on session. Our teachers, Nikka Cleofe-Alejar (Veronica's Kitchen owner and president of Filipina Home Bakers) and Wel Garcia-Dy (Toto's Bakeshop owner) said that they were not professional chefs, but Mom's who just love to bake. So I relaxed and listened to them intently.

Nikka taught us how to make no-bake mango cheesecake first. It looks easy to do and probably has the least cost among the four recipes that they taught. Here's how the mango cheesecake looked before we gobbled it up.

Then Wel taught us how to make Oreo cheesecake. I got a lot of tips from Wel since she explained some technical baking stuff in layman's terms. Aside from mixing techniques, she also gave us an overview about some baking tools and materials. You don't actually need to buy everything since you can actually make do with just a couple of stuff. You can also use local brands instead of Oreo. Here's the sumptuous Oreo cheesecake.

And then Nikka taught us how to make mini cheesecakes. I learned from this session that you should put out your ingredients, butter and cream cheese, at least an hour before you start baking so that it would be easy to mix them.

The final recipe was chocolate cheesecake and it was Wel who did the demo. I think among the four recipes this would be the most challenging for me to do since I've never baked using baking chocolate. In good time maybe.

Here's our class photo:

I'm definitely ear-marking some time this August to bake cheesecake!