This has been my go-to cheesecake for as long as I’ve been cooking. Gourmet Magazine published it in 1999 but the recipe comes from Santa Fe’s Three Cities of Spain coffeehouse* a place I knew nothing about until this week when curiosity got the better of my first intentions as a food blogger to write something concise about cake. Just down the road from an artists’ colony it was apparently a popular hangout in the 1960s for local bohemians who hosted an eclectic mix of entertainment from poets and musicians to foreign films. It closed in the mid-1970s probably around the time Santa Fe started getting too expensive for starving artists. Canyon Road was once paved. A Google search suggests that the old adobe house it was in (apparently built in 1756) became Geronimo Restaurant (named after the man who built it) in the early 1990s and is still open. What does this have to do with the cheesecake they kept in the pastry case? Very few friends — and correct me if this Manhattanite gets a Santa Fe detail wrong — but I can’t resist a cake with a story.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
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 The Cooking Foodie | 2018-11-17 16:11:47 |  255,701 Views |
Oreo Cheesecake Bars Recipe
My cheesecake story is far less interesting; the archives of this site would tell you otherwise but I came to it late. My husband loves it many of you who read this site seem to love it and I don't…don't like it. I just don't need more than one or two slices a year. I find it so heavy and overly monotonous; I always wished the proportions were different say the same amount of buttery crust and whatever topping you like but a thinner layer of baked cream cheese custard. It's no testament to my mental acuity that it took me all these years to figure out that this was the easiest way to make it happen. As bars it tastes less heavy it feeds a lot more people and it's portable which means you can take it with you anywhere this weekend (your friends will thank you).
What I’ve always loved about this cheesecake is its deadpan simplicity — 3 blocks of cream cheese 4 eggs 1 cup sugar some vanilla — and its creaminess despite the lack of sour cream or other dairy. There’s no flour and no fuss. If your cream cheese is soft enough you can whip it entirely by hand. It’s far less sweet than most so it doesn’t taste like say baked cream cheese frosting and it’s topped with a layer of barely sweetened sour cream that’s baked directly onto the cake. I think it’s brilliant; it’s a harmonious accent and visually appealing but more importantly since I have very little patience for baking in water baths (although with bars like these and no potentially leaky springform pan it would be about as easy as pie) this topping hides any cracks that might develop.
I had planned on maybe marbleizing them with a berry sauce — I think berries are a winner against cheesecake — but then I went to the Greenmarket where berry season is in full swing and everything looked so beautiful that I absolutely could not bring myself to cook them and just piled them on instead. But this recipe is flexible and I think you could adapt it in a few ways: • Skip the sour cream topping and add a dollop of whipped cream instead though I would do this closer to serving and eating. • Marble them with a raspberry or other sauce as we did here. • Top them with a chocolate glaze as we did here or start the bars with a chocolate base as we did here . • Add finely grated lemon zest of any kind by rubbing it into the sugar before adding it to the cake. • Marble the top with dulce de leche before baking. • Use a more traditional cooked fruit topping as we did here .
