Lessons from a Cheesecake

A word of caution:

I fear that today's entry might get a little...(wait for it...) cheesy.

Every year for my birthday, I make myself a cheesecake. I'm not too big on desserts, but birthday candles on a plate of nachos probably wouldn't have the right kind of "wow factor." Lucky for me, cheese makes everything better in all its forms. Thus, the birthday cheesecake tradition was made.

Tonight as I began to bake, a little light bulb went off in my mind. From the laundry list of New Year's resolutions I shared with you, one of them was that I wanted to enter the Better Homes and Gardens Prize Winning Recipe Contests. This month, one of the categories was "banana desserts."

Yes, hello...two birds? I'd like you to meet my one stone.

I decided that I wanted to try to create a "banana split cheesecake" for my birthday dessert to enter into the contest. Broken down, that means that I was going to add a ripened banana to the cheesecake batter, marble it with semi-sweet chocolate, and top it with a warm cherry sauce and whipped cream when it's ready to serve.

Little did I know my "bright idea" was going to prove to be rather dim-witted. badum-dum-chhh.

As I went about my business in the kitchen, I realized that I didn't have any ripened bananas to add to my batter. I didn't even have a yellow banana to add to my batter... I just had about 7 neon green ones. Determined that I wouldn't let this one tiny glitch wreck my entire system, I headed straight for Google.

LESSON 1- You can ripen green bananas in a closed paper bag with a tomato overnight, but if you don't have time, you can also ripen it in the microwave in 10 second intervals---or so they say. My banana actually ended up burning on the ends and staying a lovely shade of bright green in the center.

So I didn't have a ripened banana. No worries. I would just do the extra legwork to mash my partially-cooked banana to a pulp before blending it into half of my batter and I'd move along my merry way. (That sounds prize winning, yes? Partially-cooked pulp anyone?? )

Now I just needed to melt the semi-sweet chocolate to add to the other half of the batter I'd use for the marbling.
LESSON 2- Apparently chocolate chips need to be room temperature before you try to melt them in the microwave. My freezer stash of chocolate chips didn't liquefy as much as they turned into a softened, brown clump. (Partially-cooked pulp *and* brown clumps! Oh boy!)

But I was too invested to quit now. It still tasted like chocolate and I was just going to beat it into the batter with a mixer anyway, so in it went. Now I just needed to "marble" the chocolate layer into the banana layer with a knife.
LESSON 3- I am not good at marbling. My cheesecake looks like a white partially-cooked pulp layer under a brown chocolate clump layer.
Hello, two birds? Fly on, little fellas.

LESSON 4- I am a complete goober. I don't own a spring form pan. You would think with it being a birthday tradition of mine for so many years, I would have invested in something other than a pie plate...

LESSON 5- I am too hard on myself. I have been alive almost 26 years now, and I still don't know who the heck it is I am always stressing myself out to impress.

Sad truth: I almost cried a little as I put my birthday cheesecake into the oven because it didn't look *exactly* like my novice mind had envisioned it. And to add more salt to the wound, I just pulled my cheesecake out of the oven, and it looks even worse than it did going in.
There is a thin crack down the middle and a few spots that probably cooked for a little too long.


But every birthday story should have a happy ending, so here's mine.
THE BIG LESSON- After I pulled myself together from my near-meltdown, I realized that my cheesecake and I are an awful lot alike.
When my Creator came up with the recipe for me in His mind, He too hoped that I would be perfect. But I have cracks. I've been burned. I was meant to be a cheesecake and I keep trying to throw myself into a pie plate. I wasn't patient enough to wait for the right ingredients to be mixed into my life story, so I made do with less-than-perfect alternatives.
But in the end, I am still going to be perdy darn good. Whatever imperfections I have are made lovely when covered in God's grace.

(And whatever imperfections my cheesecake has will still be lovely covered in cherry sauce and whipped cream.)