So in this lesson, we'll just take a look at a basic vanilla cheesecake batter that you can add any flavor to to create any cheesecake you could imagine. So so far I have all my ingredients ready to go. I have cream cheese, you want 16 ounces, which is to regular grocery store size blocks. There's got to be sugar, eggs, which help it set and become an actual cake. And I add sour cream to mine because it gives a nice Tang and kind of rounds out that sugar up it. Now this is a vanilla base so you can use vanilla extract.

I'm going to use vanilla bean paste and if you've never used vanilla bean paste before I buy from all of nation because they have pretty good prices and their products are really good. I always love their products and Just vanilla beans, you get the flavor and you get the visual appeal of the vanilla beans but you don't have to do any of the work actually splitting and scraping apart yourself. So I like to buy that and it's just been suspended in a sugar and alcohol mixture, so it's a little bit thicker, but you can buy vanilla bean paste from any company you find. With any type of vanilla bean you find I like Madagascar vanilla beans, but to Haitian are good as well if you find that so let's get started mixing together our base cheesecake recipe. First step is get your cream cheese in the bowl.

You want to make sure your cream cheese is soft and at room temperature. I typically take mine out and let it sit for about two hours. If I know I'm going to be making a cheesecake. The wrappers that they come in are not microwavable. So if you do want to microwave the cheese, the cream cheese just a little bit doing five second increments, you don't want to melt it. If you melt it, you can't really use it.

So I recommend just setting it out a couple hours before you're ready to go. And that way it'll be nice and room temperature. And so the first thing I want to do is get this beating and really smooth. Once it's broken up pretty well going to add in our sugar and adding in the sugar at this stage is really going to help smooth out the cream cheese. The little granules are going to mix together and this is how you get your really smooth cheese cake bass is in this step you want to make sure that there are no lumps and that it's just nice and if you do have if you're seeing lumps if you're cream cheese was too cold for some reason. Then you can also pass it through a sieve before you add it to your pan.

If that becomes an issue you always want to stop and scrape your paddle and dribble. You don't want any sugar or cream cheese clumping and stuck up on the paddle. So at this point you just want to stop and check your batter. See if there's any, you'll be able to see on the size of the bowl. If you see any white lumps of cream cheese still in there and then mix it for another 30 seconds on medium speed. We just want to make sure that there's no lumps at the stage before we add the rest of our ingredients.

Good, so I am just going to start adding in my eggs. I'm just gonna pour them right in from the side of the bowl with this on low speed add them in one at a time. Mix until mostly combined before you add the next one. I have a lot of stuff, cleans my paddle and my ball so taking Moment. Scrape again. This point we can add our sour cream.

And if you make a truly old fashion cheesecake with the sour cream on top, it just complements it more and vanilla bean paste. I feel like you can never add too much vanilla to anything which is actually true. I've accidentally dumped a lot of vanilla into things before. But um, you know, add the amount that you like when it comes to vanilla. I always add measurements with my recipes, but really, it's to taste. I personally love vanilla.

I love the fragrance of it. So I tend to go a little heavy on vanilla, but I also know that the cost of it has gone up significantly this year. So you know, find a balance which you like. So my vanilla bean pace Just gonna go right in. And this just gives me the really intense vanilla flavor in addition to the vanilla beans There we go. That is our vanilla cheese cake base.

Once you've completed your luxurious cheese cake batter is going to go right in on top of our crust. Remember the graham cracker crust that we already baked. This is just a really classic cracker crust vanilla bean cheese cake right in over top have thought goodness scrape the bowl are really well. And I like to give this a little shake. And what that's going to do is if there's any air bubbles hiding in there from mixing the batter, it's going to bring them to the surface. And then that way you're going to have a really consistent cheesecake through out and to as you're baking it, those bubbles are going to come to the surface anyways, and they're going to pop and they're going to leave kind of little craters in the top of your cheesecake, but we're baking this for appearance.

We're taking the proper steps to make sure that there aren't any cracks in the top so we don't want pop bubbles either. So just give it a good shake. You can see little bubbles coming up. Just go ahead and pop those. Okay, that looks pretty good. This is ready to be dawn a while bath and baked