Experimenting with Cream Cheese

I have this potential customer that wants to see if she can get her wedding cake to be made of her favorite muffin: the cream cheese muffin. Well, I love cream cheese and was up for the challenge. I looked for a cream cheese cake recipe but since it wasn't the "proper" or traditional method for making cakes I questioned its validity. I did find a cream cheese muffin recipe and worked with that. It used all the basic ingredients for a yellow cake plus cream cheese. I just had to rearrange the way they were processed and instead of melted butter use softened butter. OK. Cool. So I tried one recipe with equal parts butter and cream cheese.

That came out good but it was dense, tasted a little eggy and just fell short of what I wanted. Then I just cut out the butter all together and just creamed the sugar and salt with cream cheese and used half the eggs. This came out wonderful. It was fluffy and you can taste the cream cheese but it's not overpowering. If you want you can beat some cream cheese and thin it out just a bit with milk and swirl it into the cake to give it more cream cheesiness goodness. And the cake looks so pretty that you could go without frosting it. Although I don't see why anyone would ever want to do that. *-)

Stacey's Cream Cheese Cake

8 ounces cream cheese

8.7 ounces sugar

.06 ounces salt

2 eggs

.14 ounces vanilla

10 ounces flour

.4 ounces baking powder

10 ounces milk

• Weigh all ingredients and let them sit til it reaches room temperature.
• Cream the cream cheese until smooth then add sugar and salt and cream til fluffy.
• Add the eggs one at a time beating til just incorporated each time then add vanilla. Beat til just incorporated.
• Whisk together flour and baking powder. Add half the flour mixture to batter. Beat til just incorporated.
• Add milk and beat til, you guessed it, incorporated.
• Add the rest of the flour mixture and beat til incorporated.
• Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes or until tooth pick inserted in center comes out clean.
• Makes enough to fill one 8" x 3" round pan