Variations on a Theme–Chiffon Cheesecakes

My grandmother had a good thing a’goin’!

Sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s my grandmother came up with a lemon cheesecake recipe. It was light and fluffy and a bit tangy. She tweaked it into the following:

2 sticks butter
8 oz cream cheese
2 C sugar
2 large cans cream, chilled (Pet or Carnation evaporated milk)
3 small lemon Jell-O
1 1/3 C hot water
Graham Cracker Crust
Mix cream cheese and sugar together. Add the water to the Jell-O and set aside. Add cream cheese and sugar to the Jell-O and whip until blended. Whip the cream one at a time and add to the mixture.
Stir all together and pour into crust.
Chill, covered with foil, in the refrigerator.

That recipe leaves out a good bit of information. Like that this recipe fills a 12″ x 18″ pan. Or that if the evaporated milk isn’t very very very cold, it hardly whips. Or that it takes a box of graham cracker crumbs to make a crust that large. This is frequently the way with vintage recipes – not everything is written down.

I’ve tweaked and updated the recipe and morphed it into the following versions – with, I think, easy to follow directions. There are future plans for a chocolate version and hopes for a blueberry version.

Lemon Chiffon Cheesecake

Lime Chiffon Cheesecake

Orange Creamsicle Cheesecake

Whipped Cream made from Evaporated Milk

 

 

Evaporated Milk Whipped Cream

Can you whip evaporated milk? You betcha!

Whipping evaporated milk seems to fail for many of my online brethren. Reports of sweetened soupy cream abound. There are two things going on here.

I think it is mostly a temperature thing. Just like regular whipping cream needs to be cold, so does evaporated milk, only more so. You really have to refrigerate the evaporated milk. It has to be cold. Put it in the coldest part of your refrigerator and let it stay there overnight. Put your mixing bowl and beaters right beside it. Yes. Really. Overnight.

The second difference between whipping evaporated milk and regular whipping cream? Fat. Whipping cream is approaching 40% fat, whereas evaporated milk is only about 7%. It takes all that fat to emulsify into a stiff whipped cream. Whipped cream made from evaporated milk will never be as stable as whipped cream made from heavy whipping cream.

You can take a look at the following video for evidence that this really can work. Notice that the splash ring on my [easyazon-link asin=”B0016KU16G” locale=”us”]Bosch mixer[/easyazon-link] has condensation on it from it having been in the ‘fridge overnight.

Also check out my chiffon cheesecake recipes for my primary use for this whipped cream:

Lemon Chiffon Cheesecake
Lime Chiffon Cheesecake
Orange Dreamsicle Cheesecake