Recipe review #2: The fluffiest cheesecake

Yesterday was the feast of Pentecost, and my family likes to celebrate major feasts in the Church. So I made a fluffy cheesecake since normal ones are always too dense and sweet and get stuck in your mouth especially if you have permanent retainers like I do :'(

I thought this cake was kinda borderline sorta technical so I decided to follow a set recipe rather than my usual reference to many as a guide and making my own flavours from it. I found this recipe from Run Away Rice by Trang (loving that title btw):

What did I do and what didn't I do while following the recipe?

The only differences between her recipe and what I did is that I used white vinegar instead of the cream of tartar; I used whole milk rather than low-fat milk; salted butter rather than unsalted; corn flour rather than corn starch; I tried to add more cream cheese than the recipe called for; and I didn't completely seal off the pan.

This recipe requires an 8" springform pan, but that kind of pan has holes, of course. And mine was 9". Trang says to fully seal it off with foil as the cake needs to be baked in a water bath to maintain moisture. I didn't properly seal it off and I got a lovely gift of water pooled at the bottom of the pan where I didn't properly seal it off. Lesson learned.

Here's a super cool sciencey thing I thought I'd never see outside of my labs, but of course, I was wrong. In chemistry we learned about something called saturation. This is what happens when you add too much of a solute, for example sugar, into a solvent, like water. If you keep adding sugar, you'll reach a point when the sugar will stop dissolving. In a similar way, I tried to add extra cream cheese but the yolk, butter, sugar mixture just wouldn't take the extra :'( the brick of cheese I used was 250g and the recipe calls for 8 oz, which is about 225g.

Something else I did a bit differently is that I whipped the egg whites until firm, rather than stopping at soft peaks. I wanted this cake extra fluffy.

When I took out the pan from the water bath I had to let it cool enough to handle, at which point I released it from the pan, put some paper towels across a cake rack to dry up a little. no, a lot. The top was nice, but when I handled it, I didn't realize how soft it was and my hand ripped the top, hence the break in the powdered sugar in the photo above. My pinkie is super tiny but it did some serious damage :/

What would I change? Honestly I wouldn't change anything about this recipe, it was really tasty, not too sweet (which is good considering the part of the world where I'm from that's notorious for HBP and diabetes).

Overall thoughts? The cake turned out really well! The cut slice didn't looks so much as Trang's cake; rather it seemed to be fluffier and less dense at the top, and more dense and cheesy at the bottom... I suppose I managed to fit more cheese in there, but it sank to the bottom. The density at the bottom may also be due to it having sat in the water for so long. The dusting of powdered sugar didn't add too much sweetness either, and with the strawberries it was the perfect mix of sweet, sour, and lack of guilt for eating too many carbs during the extended Canadian winter called quarantine!

(that cookie-like thing is an Indian sweet - recipe will be released soon, so stay tuned!)