[Sca-cooks] OT/OOP: Wazzup with "Red Velvet Cake"

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Sue Clemenger:
>I'm actually a minor Stephen King fan (books, not movies), although 
>I think the only books of his that I actually have at the moment are 
>a couple co-written with Peter Straub.  And there *may* be a copy of 
>The Stand around here somewhere....

You mean you're not a fan of the excellent movies made based on... 
uh... there was... ummmm... well, okay, we've got... "The Dead Zone". 
Then there were the made-for-TV adaptations of "The Stand" and "The 
Shining", which latter, while flawed, had the advantage of a 
producer, screenwriter, and director who had read the book shortly 
before production...

>I assume from the heavy cream/sour cream question, you're referring 
>to cheesecake? Sour cream....I like cheesecake that's got a bit of 
>tang to it--a bit of lemon zest as a flavoring, for instance.  And 
>not at lot of sugar.  It must be a regional thing to make them sweet 
>and almost....gooey, at least around here.  Even the baked ones 
>remind me of the "unbaked" kind.
>--maire, who must have been raised into the True Faith, as she can't 
>understand what use heavy cream could *possibly* have for 
>cheesecake, unless one was making cream cheese.....(dang...now I'm 
>hungry)

Yeah. A typical cheesecake, at least a cream cheese type cheesecake, 
as commonly found on or near the East Coast and elsewhere, will 
consist of cream cheese, some kind of dairy additive like heavy cream 
or sour cream to thin it down and make the batter "whippable", eggs 
or egg yolks to set it like a custard (never mind that the end 
product is denser than a custard), plus sugar and flavorings, and an 
optional pastry (or other) crust/liner.

The classic New York cheesecake, of the Lindy's or Junior's variety, 
always used to contain sour cream, but I've been noticing recent 
recipes calling for heavy cream instead. Clearly the acid content, 
and therefore the tang, is going to be higher when sour cream is 
used, over the same recipe using heavy cream.

One thing about cream cheese cheesecakes (as opposed to things like 
ricotta cheesecakes) that I notice as I go westward from the East 
Coast (note the small sample size) is the almost astonishing 
whiteness of the cake. I'm not sure how this is achieved, but the 
classic New York cheesecake is kind of yellowish, or maybe 
ivory-colored, because of the eggs, I assume. Not yellow like an 
omelette, just distinctly off-white.

Now, I figure a no-bake cheesecake would tend not to contain eggs 
(the salmonella thing being what it is), and I guess they do tend to 
contain gelatin. But how do they get baked cheesecakes so white? Just 
a minimal amount of egg, or no egg, or whites only?

Adamantius