Red Velvet Cheesecake

Tonight the fam and I were invited over to a friend's house for dinner. Fish Friday at an actual fisherman's house? Oh heck yeah! Our gracious host and hostess made the best fried mutton snapper. For those of you who do not like fish I have to recommend the mutton snapper as a very unfishy fish with firm white flesh. Tastes great, cooks easily and fish is after all brain food.

No sooner had the adults sat down to eat than we heard a dreadful wailing. Turns out that our darling girl had accidentally slammed her finger in the bedroom door of her friend. Our very nice hosts told us to go take the girl to the hospital. Not only did they keep our younger daughter for us while we went, when we got back they had kept our plates warm and covered. Then we were all able to relax with my contribution to the dinner. I made my very first sweet cheesecake. Once I made a savory crab cheesecake with a wild mushroom and cream reduction, but my husband has made a tradition of making me a new kind of cheesecake every year on Valentine's day. This year was scheduled to be the decadent and Valentine's day appropriate Red Velvet Cheesecake, but time and circumstances precluded that. So I took it upon myself to make it today. You can get the recipe here. It was a very good recipe, but I didn't use sour cream in it, I had some Greek yogurt and used that instead. I would tweak it slightly too by making a sweetened sour cream top instead of the thicker cream cheese and sugar top they used.

Red velvet is such a luxe tasting cake or cheesecake you'll hardly believe you are adding 2 bottles of food coloring to it! It just seems to odd to color a chocolate cake that way, but the result is undeniably striking. A true red velvet is a chocolate flavored dessert that also contains buttermilk which gives it a slight tang and keeps it from being too sweet. This recipe called for buttermilk as well as a teaspoon of white vinegar! The taste of that vinegar is not present in the finished product, but my research leads me to believe that the additional acidity may be to keep the color bright, since red is an anthocyanin? I am thinking of the reason we add a slug of white vinegar to red cabbage to keep it from turning grey when cooked. Anyhow, this was a terrific dessert and I am glad I tried it!

Happy Weekend everyone!