Cottage Industry Part 2

Ahhh, cheesecakes.



No dessert can gain you notoriety so quickly.



As Alton Brown put it in one of his cookbooks, "someone who can make a cheesecake well can walk into a room with his head held high."



My head is scraping the 8' ceilings right now, and almost too big to fit through the doorways!



I blogged about what kept me busy over the winter holidays. And I was indeed busy.



In that 6-week period, I made sold almost 100 cheesecakes for friends.



When you consider I can make 3 a day, you can see that it was an every-morning-at-5am endeavor.



I also had the pleasure of creating some new recipes.



My two pride-and-joys are the Vanilla Chai cheesecake (Tea-infused cheesecake with notes of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger poised on a vanilla cardamom cookie crust) and the Chocolate Cow cheesecake (A homemade brownie layered with Kahlua-spiked cheesecake and topped with rich dark chocolate ganache).





But once the New Year had passed, and everyone (self included) started their post-Christmas body detox, if I wanted this to continue I was going to have to take it to the local restaurants.



So last week 4 Samplers went out. 2 no-responses, one negative response (from the restaurant that had just asked me for my list of ingredients, isn't that interesting?),



And A YES!



Sakai, our local sushi house/HIbachi Palace has asked me to make them a special cheesecake for their menu. Green Tea. Oh, I'm so excited! AND they want the Chocolate Cow and a Raspberry Lemon Curd (homemade lemon curd and raspberry syrup made from these raspberries). Doubly exciting when you understand that the chef said he probably wouldn't be able to sell anything but green tea, and then changed his mind after sampling my product.



My foot is officially In. The. Door.



Praise God! He is amazing. He will always take care of us!