Key Lime Vanilla Bean Cheesecake

My tree full of key limes just outside my kitchen window has been begging me to make this since we moved in and she was covered in lovely white blossoms.

I read about ten recipes looking for the perfect Key Lime Cheesecake, to no avail. I was searching for a phenomenal cheesecake with phenomenal key lime flavor. Most of those I read had only a tablespoon or two of lime juice, and others had only a small amount of cream cheese.

So I created this, using the amounts of lime in the super lime-y ones paired with the high cream cheese content and baking method used in the America's Test Kitchen New York Cheesecake recipe. And it is amazing.

Note: if you don't own an instant-read thermometer or a kitchen scale, get one. You will never have dry cookies or over-baked custard or meat again. I have the OXO Good Grips Chef's Digital Leave-In Thermometer and highly recommend it.

Key Lime Vanilla Bean Cheesecake Recipe

Crust
2 c. graham cracker crumbs (6.5 oz, about 1.5 sleeves)
3 T. sugar (1.5 oz)
1/4 t. salt
1/4 c. butter, melted

Filling
4 8-oz packages cream cheese, at room temperature (this is important)
1/2 vanilla bean, just the seeds (you can reserve the seed pod for another use) - can use 2 t. of vanilla extract if you don't have vanilla beans
2 t. key lime zest
2 c. sugar (14 oz)
2/3 c. key lime juice
1/2 c. sour cream
1/2 t. salt
4 eggs plus 2 egg yolks

Preheat oven to 350. For the crust, combine all ingredients and press into the bottom of a greased 9-inch springform pan. Bake until fragrant but not browned - about 8 minutes. Turn the oven up to 500.

For the filling, mix the cream cheese in a stand mixer on medium-low until smooth, about 2 minutes. Don't incorporate air as this will increase the chance of your cheesecake cracking. Add the vanilla bean seeds, zest, and sugar. Mix on low until incorporated. Add juice, sour cream, and salt. Mix on low until incorporated and scrape down the sides with a spatula. Add eggs and yolks, one at a time, mixing after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Mix another 30-60 seconds .

Pour filling over crust and bake at 500 for 10 minutes. WITHOUT OPENING THE OVEN, turn the heat down to 200 and bake for another 40-50 minutes, until the filling has an internal temperature of 150. Baking on low heat until the correct internal temperature has been reached makes for a smooth, creamy cheesecake, not the dry, egg-y mess you can sometimes end up with.

Remove the cheesecake from the oven and let it cool to room temperature. Then wrap tightly and store refrigerated. Serve with lightly sweetened whipped cream if desired, or whatever else you'd like to throw on it to put it over the top. Candied lime? Toasted coconut? Sweetened sour cream? It's pretty fantastic all by itself.

(the holes in the top of the cheesecake are from the thermometer probe. if you don't want yours to end up this dark, lightly cover the top of the pan with foil for the first half of baking time.)

Our new house! - April 2013

 
We decided in April that it would be a useful exercise to look at a few houses for sale so that we would be more informed when it came time to buy a house when our lease was up in October.

Then we decided we should move during the summer so Josh wouldn't have to switch schools only a month into the school year.

Then, during one of our "useful exercise" excursions, we found a house that we couldn't pass up. 

So we put in an offer. 

And that's how we bought a house. 

Helping me pack.

And that's how our bank account went from "comfortable" to "flat broke but in a really great house."

Scout helping me shop for our new pad.

Our neighborhood is amazing, although much farther from Mario's work than we had hoped to end up (about 10 miles). There are a ton of kids and lots of very friendly neighbors. We live on a very quiet cul-de-sac.

It's pretty freaking amazing, actually, that this is our life.

Unpacking and hanging out with Yaya.

The kids fell in love with it immediately. When we came for the inspection before the sale closed, I was explaining to Josh that we were only going to be at this house for a few hours, then we would have to go home but that we would come live at the new house soon. "Oh, please [can we] live at new house? Oh please oh please!" he said. We've been living here for almost 3 months now and he still calls it the "new house."

Yaya came out to help us during the move. 

 I'll admit, most days I feel as though I bit off quite a bit more than I can chew. Cutting the grass alone is 2+ hours a week, and I haven't even attempted to keep up with weeding or tending the plants that are already here. It's been a challenge trying to learn how to take care of the pool (Seriously, what happens to the oodles of very strong, very expensive chemicals I dump into this thing every single week?! Do they really just disappear?), apart from the fact that these two munchkins can't resist throwing every single blasted thing they can get their hands on into it. And obviously there is a great deal of space inside for my darling children to fill with crumbs, dirt, toys, clothes, and whatever else they feel like throwing around. 

But it is a gorgeous home, and we are so blessed to have it. I never imagined I would own something like this. 

I never imagined a lot of things about my life, though, and almost all of them are great. 

April 2013

Her hair is FINALLY long enough for pigtails!! Happy day!

One of my Christmas presents was a cooking class at our local Whole Foods, which happens to be the flagship store, corporate offices, and huge. I'm not necessarily a big Whole Foods fan, but this place is impressive. And it has a playground on the roof! Anyway, they host cooking classes, and we went to Korean Cooking 101. It was a blast! We made our own gimchee, vegetable pancakes, marinated short-ribs, yam noodle stir-fry, and porkbelly-gimchee stew.  Merry Christmas to me! (I know I took a picture of us at the class, but I can't find it anywhere!)

One of the lovely things about the kids getting older is establishing or renewing family traditions. For Easter, Josh and I had a great time coloring eggs and putting random Easter bunnies and eggs into his usual slew of drawings. He had so much fun coloring the eggs that we actually colored the same eggs about three times on consecutive days. We made sugar cookies together, which he then refused to eat. He told me they were yukky. His favorite part of the holiday was pretending to be the Easter bunny. He would take his basket of eggs from the assorted egg hunts he participated in before the actual holiday and hide the eggs around the house. Then he would go find them again. And then hide them again.


 For Easter, I decided to do a meal inspired by my time in Chile. I made traditional Chilean empanadas de pino, which have seasoned ground beef, hard-boiled eggs, raisins, and olives. I also made some more adventurous ones with roasted poblano peppers, butternut squash, and manchego cheese, with a delightful habanero cream sauce for dipping. Lovely!

This is how Scout entertains herself.

Josh cleaned house during the egg hunt on Easter morning. He was aided by the fact that once Scout discovered there was chocolate in her first eggs, she sat down happily on the deck and ate it for the rest of the time while Josh ran around finding the rest of the eggs. And then Josh hid all of his eggs and found them again. A couple times.

Not as motivated once she got her hands on some chocolate.

Then we had another egg hunt and dessert with the Ancers (including, of course, Josh's most favorite friend Mirabel).

Mario has been working a ton, but he's enjoying it. We couldn't have designed a job better suited to him. Except for the long hours, it's been a dream come true.

Saturday morning fun with Daddy!

January to March other stuff

In other January - March happenings, Josh has cycled through a variety of very intense obsessions.
He learned about Valentine's Day at school and had a lot of fun celebrating all things pink and red and heart-shaped for a week.

He was obsessed with playdough for a while. He's not very confident in his playdough skills, though, so he asks me to make what he wants. And what he wanted was animals. He always asked for the same four animals, all in the same order, and all in the same color scheme. I noticed when I was going through these pictures that he also picked shades specifically going from dark to light every time.

Giving his animal friends a pep talk before the photo shoot.

 

His class went to a theater to see a performance of the book Goodnight Moon. I've never been a big fan of the book as it strikes me as weird (Goodnight nobody? Seriously? That part kind of gives me the willies, actually.) and boring (no offense to those who love it - it just doesn't do anything for me), but he fell in love with it and memorized it that very day.

He went through a Mr. Potato Head phase when he would spend an hour or so every day putting two Mr. Potato Heads together, pulling them apart, and putting them together again exactly the same way and in the same order. And for a while he put the noses below the mouths every single time, even though he accurately identified both parts. Funny kid!

Then they started reading fairy tales at school and he came home with an appetite for Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He memorized the book and determined that I, of course, was Mama Bear, Mario was Papa Bear, Scout was Baby Bear, and he was Goldilocks. One evening he went to bed asking for porridge. I told him he could have some for breakfast. He woke up at 4am desperate for porridge. I told him to go back to sleep because it wasn't time to get up yet. At 5:30am he again begged for porridge. Once again I convinced him to wait. At 6:30, I let him get out of bed and we went downstairs to make some porridge. "Are you excited to eat your porridge?" I asked. "Well," he said, "I want pancakes!" So pancakes it was. He also often describes things in terms of Goldilocks now, as in "Oh, it's too soft! Like Mama Bear!" or "It's just right, like Baby Bear bed!"

They love to steal my SlimFast (knockoff) shakes. Hey, it's protein, right?

He loved the Billy Goats Gruff for about two weeks, but we only have 2 goat-like toy animals and he needed a third. So I taped some paper horns on a donkey and saved the day. Go me.

Chef Josh!

He came home from school with a chef hat one day and wanted to make a special dessert for after dinner, so he made graham crackers with nutella. He still loves to help me bake, but he especially likes to help when he's Chef Josh.

Josh's language is growing in leaps and bounds. His sentence length has tripled since he started school in October. TRIPLED. It's simply amazing. And with his language development has come remarkable social development. When I was trying to get the photos above with his playdough animals, I heard him talking to them and explaining that they shouldn't be scared because Mama was just going to take some pictures and they needed to say "Cheese!", okay? He loves to boss Scout around when he can, and gets endless thrills out of taking things away from her.

One of the other things we've struggled with is Josh's eating. He was a great eater until he was about 1, then he got pretty picky, but not abnormally so (except for his issues with textures, but we'll leave that out of this one). When he broke his leg around 2 years old, he kind of stopped eating everything. The fracture came on the tail of about four months spent in transition, all of which combined to stress him out enough that he cut basically EVERYTHING out of his diet. For about a month, he survived on goldfish, milk, toast, and chocolate chip pancakes in spite of everything we tried. It was bad enough that his speech therapist recommended we enlist the help of an occupational therapist to address his eating. We have slowly (painfully slowly) been climbing out of that hole. As with his speech challenges, I have researched and studied, brainstormed and prayed. And I am so happy to say that he's just a normal 3-year-old eater these days! His favorite lunch currently is a grilled cheese sandwich, strawberries, and steamed broccoli. BROCCOLI!! And he eats what we eat for dinner, most of the time with the help of hefty bribes of the chocolate or motion picture variety, but still! Just the fact that he will put something in his mouth that he doesn't already know he loves is astonishing, given where we started.

Family movie night!

We got the movie Hop (which we first showed Josh a year ago during one of our potty training attempts) around Easter and since then Josh often wants to hear "The Easter Bunny Song," which, unfortunately, is Dynamite by Taoi Cruz. It's not a very good song, but he loves it because it's the song the bunny plays on the drums in the movie. That has opened up his ears, so to speak, and he enjoys listening to my music during the day now. He inexplicably enjoys Bruno Mars and will perk up to listen when he hears an R&B beat.

She watches her brother closely. She's sitting on the potty reading a book, just like Josh. Ha!

Little Scout is also learning in leaps and bounds. She talks up a storm when she's in the mood, and learns a new word almost every day. She's even starting to sing a little, which is fun. She regularly picks steamed vegetables over fruit, bread, and even most desserts when they're available. And she is becoming quite the little Boss Hogg as her language develops, which may not even be her fault as that was my nickname as a child.

We took the kiddos to the Austin Rodeo & Fair a few weeks ago. They had, by a landslide, the most awesome petting zoo I've ever seen. There were goats and sheep of all sizes, deer, llamas, kangaroos (!), and cows. Scout loves animals, but only from about 3 feet away. She's deathly afraid of touching pretty much any kind of animal, so she enjoyed the petting zoo from outside the fence with Mario. Josh, on the other hand, had an absolute ball. He even summoned the courage to actually get on a pony this time, instead of chickening out like he did at the Fairbanks Fair last summer. Twice! And we didn't even tell him to take his hat off, wave it around in a circle, and say "Yeee-haaaaw!"

Yee-haw!!

Both of my children LOVE to color. For a very long time, Josh refused to color. He used to love to finger paint, but he would just spread the paint around, not actually try to paint anything in particular. He didn't like to color at all, or draw. Recently, however, he has taken a great interest in it. He used to ask me to draw animals, then he would look at the drawing for a few seconds and ask me to draw another animal (unsurprisingly, always the same animals and always in the same order). Now he asks me to draw things so he can color them. And then he asks for more. He has run a whole pack of markers dry in the space of three weeks, and let's not talk about the amounts of paper we go through! For a while it was vehicles (race car, bus, boat, truck, and motorcycle), and since he has discovered dinosaurs I'll bet you can guess what I get to draw every day! But the most exciting thing is he will actually try to draw things sometimes now! I sat him down with a piece of paper right next to me. Then I would draw a single line on my paper and ask him to do the same on his paper. Then I would draw the second line on my paper and ask him to make the same line on his paper. It was so exciting I was crying the whole time, like I cried the morning a few weeks ago that I handed him his socks and he just put them on.

In the interest of helping Josh's physical and social development, we signed him up for a gymnastics class about the same time he started school. When we started, he wouldn't do one single activity without the help of his teachers. Then he started doing forward rolls by himself. Then he got some confidence and would try things on his own. This week, he did a four-activity routine all by himself while his teacher was helping someone else on the other side of the gym. Awesome.

January - March

January was quiet. Just same old, same old, except that Mario volunteered (or was involuntarily volunteered) for a bunch of projects at work that really took a toll on his non-working life. It's a good thing he loves his work or we would have all been miserable!

Valentine's Day was pretty quiet. We had a date night scheduled, but Mario got surprised by a deadline that was moved at work and ended up spending his evening at the office. We did enjoy a delightful chocolate souffle cake with a molten ganache center when we got home, though.

Josh and Yaya playing in the snow.

In February, we drove to Salt Lake City for a short visit. We got to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Albuquerque on the way there and on the way home, and in Utah we got to see another brother and his family, plus my aunt, uncle, grandma, mission president, one of my favorite mission companions, my college roommate, and my mom!

 

Isn't she gorgeous?

I also took advantage of the opportunity to take Mario to eat at the Seafood Buffet, the restaurant at Deer Valley Ski Resort that my brothers and I (and many more friends) all worked at after high school. The restaurant was only open at night, so we got to ski all day and then cook (and eat!) delicious food all night! It was a pretty awesome tradition we had in my family, and I think it's very cool that all of us did it at least once. It sure was a trip down memory lane to go back! It was just like I remembered. Favorite dishes of the night were prime rib with garlic mash, roasted baby duck breast with thyme white chocolate sauce, shrimp bisque with lemon creme, sweet peel and eat shrimp, and sprinkled in between savory courses were several chocolate snowballs and a chocolate cherry cheesecake that I still dream about.

The next morning we skied at Deer Valley. My parents are very active people, and we grew up doing as many sports as we possibly could (golf, volleyball, skeet shooting, water skiing and all associated sports where one is towed behind a speed boat, snow skiing, motorcycles, quads, soccer, football, baseball, track, swimming, white water rafting, kayaking, surfing, hiking, running, and biking, just to name a few) . One of those sports was skiing. My Grandpa Josephson taught us all how to ski when we were just little tykes, and we had many awesome family vacations at Big Sky Resort in Montana while we were growing up. Mario had skied a few times, but this was only our second time going together (the first was in Vermont during his first year of law school. It was 7 degrees, poor snow cover, lots of ice, and I was two months pregnant with Josh, which were less-than-ideal conditions, so it wasn't as fun as it could have been.) He did great! By the end of the day he was really getting the hang of it, and we're excited to go again next year, especially to take Josh and Scout!

Not a great picture, I know, but we were too busy skiing to worry about photos!

We spent a day at the Children's Museum in SLC. Josh loved the balls and the water tables, but his favorite part, both of that day and the whole week, was spending time with his cousins and YaYa (my mom).

Little Max.

Putting on a play about turtles and dragons at the Children's Museum.

At the Children's Museum with Ben, Yaya and Kendall.

 I served a mission in Chile Concepcion a decade ago. I was blessed to serve with amazing people who changed my life then, and who by some miracle believe it's worth their energy to keep in touch with me! I've never met anyone who would feel comfortable calling their mission president at the drop of a hat and asking if he'd like to get together for dinner. My mission president is just awesome like that. We had a great evening with Presidente Romney and The Hermana (as we called her), as well as one of my favorite companions, Brittany, and her son.

From the right: Pres. Romney, Sis. Romney, Brittney & Parx, Mario, Josh, Scout and me.

On the way home, we crashed at Scott and Anita's place for the weekend. Albuquerque is a lot of fun, and we had a great time wandering around spending time together and eating. Of course we started the day with a trip to Frontier for breakfast - and if you're ever within any reasonable distance of Albuquerque, do not miss Frontier! - then some Chopsticks for lunch. Also if you're ever within any reasonable distance of Albuquerque and have always wondered what REAL Chinese food tastes like, do not miss Chopsticks! All four of us lived in China for a year. And this is the real deal. Seriously. Then for dinner we sampled some delectable tacos and finished the night in style with fish tacos and carne asada french fries from The Last Call.

It was wonderful to spend time with family and friends, and some great time with my own little family. The kids spent 48 hours in the car to and from Utah, and while it wasn't exactly our easiest 48 hours together, it was a lot of fun when it wasn't horrible.

For Mario's birthday, I signed us up for a team race called Urban Dare. It's a kind of photo scavenger hunt all through downtown Austin. They gave us a list of clues that we had to figure out and then run to to get a picture or perform a dare. I think we ended up running 6 or 7 miles. It was a nice change from our usual dates. Happy birthday, Mario!