Cheesecake

As the last Thursday in July, today is National Cheesecake Day and a good day to celebrate, if you love cheesecake as much as I do. It's my all-time favorite desert. I've never eaten a flavor that I didn't like, but my favorite is turtle cheesecake, followed by the ones with fruit toppings.

Cheesecake is actually older than I would have guessed. Some historians believe a form of it was popular in ancient Greece, and a Greek physician wrote a book on how to make them. The Romans adopted it, after they conquered Greece. The earliest recipe we still have is found in an English cookbook from 1390. 

Modern forms of cheesecake in the United States and Canada usually use cream cheese; in Italy, ricotta is used; and Germany, the Netherlands and Poland use quark. The cake is normally baked in a springform cake pan, sometimes in a water bath to distribute the heat more evenly. Because cheesecakes are so dense, they often continue cooking for a while after they are taken from the oven.

There are lots of cheesecake recipes out there to try, and there's also some very good commercially prepared ones to buy. So, today is a good day to splurge, forget about the calories and fat content, and have a piece of your favorite one to celebrate.

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