Speaking of cheese, I made this lovely ricotta cheesecake this past weekend for our Equestrian Team end of the year dinner.
It was an epic baking experience. Since I have no kitchen, I asked Caitlin if I could borrow hers. Caitlin was my CRA (Commons Residential Adviser) last year and now she works in the admissions office. At Middlebury, CRA’s are recently graduated students who live in an apartment in a freshman dorm and give advice and let people use their kitchens or tv’s. In terms of the commons “family”, your CRA is your really cool aunt. We got really attached to Caitlin and we still go to her house every Thursday night to watch Lost.
In the process...
The only problem is that Caitlin seriously lacks MIXING BOWLS. This is an issue. You see that bowl in the picture above? That was still missing many ingredients. I blended for as long as I could with my electric mixer, then had to switch to very, VERY carefully stirring. Not only was it a small bowl, but the sides of it were SLANTED. Well, I prevailed…
Oh, it's a CAKE
One more thing I lacked was a rolling pin. So I just kind of pressed the dough down into the pan. This led to a thick corner edge of the crust and a kind of thin center. Many difficulties ensued when trying to remove it from the bottom of Katie’s ancient tart pan (which she found at a rummage sale or something).
Who needs a kitchen when you have a dorm room?
So I finally left Caitlin’s and left the cake in my boyfriend’s little fridge. The next morning I went ahead to add my strawberries. Who needs counter tops when you have a desk and a chair, though? That’s part of my very brightly colored room. I sat where the orange plate was and sliced strawberries on top of it on my lap. Cutting boards? Nah. College live is all about improvising, right?
That's one of the nicely colored dining hall plates it's on.
Strawberry slicing took a little bit of learning. First I sliced some too thick and some too thin. Then I finally figured out a good slice size and ate all of my mistakes. Ehe. To me, the cake looks like a cake-colored lily pad with a big strawberry flower blooming on top of it.
Final Product
The team was quite impressed. This is one of my first, more complex from-scratch endeavors up here. I can make a damn good key lime pie from scratch (or other types of pie) but that only takes 20 minutes or so. Anyway, it felt really good when the girls oooh’d and ahhh’d over it. And then everyone took a bite and it was quiet for a second then there were a lot of “mmm, wow, Ruthie!”s.
my cake, my pottery, and my cactus
