Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Cheesecake Fantasy vs. The American Dream

I was first introduced to cheesecake when I first came to the States. I remember my American mom bought this collage of different flavored cheesecake from the grocery store and I had fallen in love with this magical creamy delicacy since then. Then I went back to China, and my romance with the cheesecake became a long distance relationship where at the beginning I lived on beautiful reminiscences and then gradually got lost once again in the colorful Chinese gastronomy and alienated from the American desserts. But I was reunited with my estranged lover at T.G.I. Friday's in Beijing.
Now that I'm back in the land of cheesecakes, I have recuperated my love, and I was found whole again.
I remember the first time McDonald's was opened in my hometown in China my aunt took me and my cousin over there for a meal after she got her first paycheck. I took a bite of the Big Mac served in a brown box and was instantly disgusted by it. She bought us many other things as well, but only the disgust I felt towards Big Mac remained vivid in my memory. Who could know that only years later I had acquired a convenient love for the American fast food that was fast invading Chinese market. It was delicious, it's fast and it's American. Fortunately we have passed the era that Ha Jin descibed in his story about the American fried chicken restaurant in China that caused much conflict in the community purely because of the fact that it was considered capitalist and thus bad. The western culture has learned to not only expand to this vast consumer market but adapt to the local tastes. KFC now sells breakfast in Chinese style and meals with rice. I imagined myself eating these wonderful food when I would be in the country of their motherland. It was part of the American dream.
However, I've hardly ever eaten at a fast food place in the States, maybe five times total in the course of a year. I have learned that there's much more to the Western cuisine than McDonald's and KFC and preferred to cook myself, as you probably have figured out by now.
The cheesecake fatansy is realized once more and the American dream is on her way to be realized, I think I shall push it forward more by attempting to make cheesecakes: the task that almost seemed impossible.
So here it is, my 3-D chocolate cheesecake, well technically it's 2-D because I didn't use chocolate graham crackers, you know me, I wouldn't make a single recipe without making a little subsitution.

And I realized I don't have a cookie sheet deep enough for me to put boiling water in to bake the cheesecake, therefore the old saucepan had to do.

When it's chocolate, it has to be a little messy haha.