Mother's Day / Father's Day Bakefest

This year I decided to bake for both my parents for their respective holidays, but Mother's Day was in the middle of this busy school week, so I didn't end up baking anything then. Therefore I decided to bake for both of them on Father's Day with a couple of amigas. [Excuse the poor photo quality... kitchen lighting is rarely good, and my parents devoured the food before I could re-shoot anything!]

For Mom: Strawberry Swirl Cheesecake Bars
Recipe from My Kitchen Snippets, reproduced below:

Ingredients :

1 ¼ cups graham crumbs
¼ cup butter, melted
2 packets (8 oz each) cream cheese, softened at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp flour
3 tbsp of lemon juice
2 eggs
1/3 cup strawberry jam

1. Preheat oven to 325ºF. Grease and line an 8” x 8” square baking with parchment paper with leaving an overhang on both side (for easy removing you slices later)
2. Mix crumbs and butter together and press firmly into bottom of the pan. Set it aside.
3. Beat cream cheese, sugar, flour and lemon juice in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Add eggs, one at a time, beating on low speed after each addition, just until blended. Pour over crust.
4. Heat up strawberry jam slightly in the microwave. Gently drop jam by small spoonfuls over top of batter. Cut through batter several times with knife for marble effect.
5. Bake 40 min. or until centre is set. Cool. Refrigerate at least 4 hours or overnight before cutting it.

It actually took quite a bit longer to bake in our experience; the cheesecake didn't seem to set for another half hour at least. Might be an oven issue, but it turned out fine after some extra time in the oven. We also didn't have four hours to spare, so we refrigerated it for about half an hour for it to cool down, and then popped it into the freezer for about an hour [I'm guesstimating here...] until the pan was ice cold. We didn't seem to have any problems cutting it after that.





Jam swirled: Pre-baking and Post-baking





Cut up for presentation! [The three of us split the pan of cheesecake, so each of us reserved 1/3 of the whole to give to parents.]







Amy decided to cut a heart out of her portion:

For Dad: Almond Cookies [Chinese Restaurant Inspired]
Recipe from AllRecipes, shown below:

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup lard
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 96 almonds [...we ended up using about 42]
  

Directions:

1. Sift flour, sugar, baking soda and salt together into a bowl. Cut in the lard until mixture resembles cornmeal. Add egg and almond extract. Mix well.
2. Roll dough into 1 inch balls. Set them 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Place an almond on top of each cookie and press down to flatten slightly
3. Bake in a pre-heated 325 degrees F (165 degrees C) oven for 15-18 minutes. Cool on rack.

Going along with much of the advice from recipe reviews, we toasted our almonds beforehand, used 2.5 teaspoons of almond extract, and used an eggwash [one egg white + one tbsp water] on the cookies before baking. They were pretty difficult to shape because of the dough's highly crumbly nature, which was annoying... but the end product was a very crispy and buttery cookie. Oh, and we also baked it for quite a bit longer than the recipe recommends. See, both these instances point towards the oven as the culprit, but... we ultimately just baked until the eggwash became significantly colored. [Thus the first batch was palest.] We kept an eye on the bottoms to make sure they didn't burn, but we baked the cookies until there was a more appetizing color on the surface.





As you can see, the dough was crazy crumbly and Amy has a thing for hearts.





The cookies puffed up and only spread a little bit. So a couple of our thicker cookies ended up looking more like rice krispie treats, imo...

Arranged for presentation: Amy's in her tin, mine in a stack. [Joey kind of just packaged hers up for transportation convenience.]