Carlson Recipe #19(1)

Graham Cracker Crust:

8 Graham Cracker sheets (1 ½ cups)

3 tablespoons of melted Butter

3 tablespoons of Sugar

Raspberry(2) Cheesecake:

9 oz of Raspberries (1 cup)

48 oz of Cream Cheese (6 cups)

A pinch* of Salt * And a half

1 ½ teaspoons of Vanilla Extract

12 oz of Eggs (6 Eggs)

14 oz of Sugar (2 ½ cups)

Butter Cream Frosting:

4 ½ cups of Confectioners Sugar (Powdered)

1 ½ cups of Butter

1 ½ teaspoons of Vanilla Extract

2 tablespoons of Whipped Cream(3)

Directions:

• Preheat oven at 350 degrees. Mix 3 tablespoons of melted butter with 8 Graham Cracker sheets and 3 tablespoons of sugar, mix until the ingredients are together. Firmly press crust into pie tin. Bake for 10 minutes or until it sets.
• Puree raspberries, then run them through a cheesecloth. Mix what remains with 3 tablespoons of sugar. Remove the pie crust and turn the temperature on the oven to 325 degrees for the cake.
• Whip the cream cheese until fluffy, then mix in sugar slowly as to avoid clinging(4). Add your eggs, salt, and vanilla extract, mixing slowly to not over whip the product. Pour the product into the crust shell. Pour the raspberry a teaspoon at a time into the cake, swirl with a toothpick. Put the tin in a long shallow pan with water that touches the center of the tin. Leave in the oven until it sets; the center should have some give to it.
• This steps can take between 10-20 minutes. Save this step until right before you take the cake out. Put confectioners sugar and butter into a mixing bowl, blending them. Add extract and your whipped cream and blend until spreadable.(5)*

* I always believe a cake (especially a fruit flavored cake) should be garnished with fruit, however, the blackberries I grow seem always to bleed into my frosting, causing noxious swirls of deep red into the frosting. So for me, I put a single berry in the center to maintain a solitary balance.(6)(7)

Notes:

1. Carlson Family’s Super Awesome Extra Velvety Raspberry Birthday Cheesecake
2. I’ve never met him, but I’ve been told that my grandfather was a baker. He was gone before I was born, before I left my mommy’s womb, left when papa was a young boy. Daddy always said, “That was the best cake I ever got, and it was all I ever wanted for my birthday.” Except Daddy wanted yucky strawberry in his cakes, disgusting slimy seedy strawberries. I like to close my eyes, go to a time when Daddy ate those berries, looking out over our yard. Red smile smacking with black seeds clinging to the corners of his lips, little bugs trying to hear his every word, like me. I’ve never seen Daddy eat them, says they made his tummy hurt when he grew up, it makes his eyes all puffy and runny too. But I know that Daddy likes raspberries, I see him eat them in the corner of the yard out by the road, out of Grampy’s favorite bush.
3. Whipped cream is Daddy’s favorite part, it’s too sweet for me. Daddy and Grampy have a sweet tooth that I haven’t developed yet. Perhaps one day. I. I like the berries. They go Sugar Pop in your mouth, a real tasty treat. I love the ones we grow in our yard. I eat the raspberries now too, in the same bush as Daddy, looking over the road, gobbling berries by bunches, my hands pigmented red, passed down through genetics, Mommy always says.
4. I remember when Daddy first told me about the cake, I was so excited. I was being admitted into the family baking club. I was joining a tradition with deep roots that burrowed all around me everyday. One day, a Wednesday, though it could have been any day, he came in with the BIGGEST bag, bulging berries bleeding through cloth, separating berries and juice. He told me about the rich texture, palate pleasing twinge of tart berry that rippled through your nose, making your eyes tingle as though you just drank fairy mist. He told me about the delicious contrast of cream with the butter crust crunch of the base, how that foundation never broke. I asked him every question I could about it, the first thing we could bond over, I didn’t want to miss a mystic moment, any opportunity to learn from him. Daddy said business picked up, so now Daddy is always busy at work, which is why I picked up this recipe to study, practice makes perfect someone said. I was so excited that first time he was going to the grocery store to get the ingredients.
5. I can read this list of ingredients to you forward and backwards and even upside down maybe. In my sleep I see, whisks whipping frosting to the consistency of fluffy clouds and frozen snow drifts. I smell golden graham floating through the kitchen, my skin slick with the smell of butter. Like a culinary minuteman I do baking drills in my dreams, tossing and turning into sugar, and butter, and cream cheese, a little confectionary treat myself. I come down each maple stair on my birthday, on the table are all the ingredients, just as every year, the eggs in a simple beautiful stack, such fragility and beauty. The butter melts on a rectangle shape plate, delicious yellow sweat pools around its base. I ask Mommy where Grampy is? When he is coming back? She says dead again, but that’s not what Daddy told me. Daddy told me that Grampy left Daddy, left him alone with sick Grammy. Left Daddy and the raspberries and never came back. I sit in front of the ingredients like I do every year, every birthday since I found out, 38 years ago, in front of these holy bases, these sublime ingredients into a new world I was always hungry for, and I wait for Daddy to come home and teach me how to cook our cake.
6. I like the swirls, vortexes of red, like reaching out, trying to be one with the cream, like a hug between friends. I imagine a raspberry diving into a snowbank. Seeking the deepest cold it can swim to. One berry is so lonely, it wants a friend, who won’t care about the mixed frosting, well, because he will be flawed too, or ugly. But that’s ok. Mommy says Daddy is never coming back, that Daddy is still hurting from Grampy, but I know she is wrong. Work just got busy, he has to work hard to provide for us, he told me so years ago. But I don’t have a big sweet tooth, so I might not use as much sugar, but I know that Daddy loves sugar. When he comes back I’ll ask him how much sugar to use, we’ll make a cake and laugh at Mom for saying he wouldn’t come back.
7. Sorry for all the smears, I just came back from the bush.