Portmanteau recipes have become really trendy in baking circles ever since the cronut became so popular. Ridiculously popular, really - the wikipedia article for cronuts says that people were selling them on the black market for $100. A black market for upscale New York City bakery items. My mind is officially boggled.
Now that I'm going to a monthly potluck (thanks, M and S!), I've got a regular schedule for experimenting. This time I scrolled through my enormous collection of untried recipes and selected the first two that caught my eye: candied lemon cheesecake and sugar doughnut muffins (aka doffins). I hadn't tried any portmanteau recipes before this so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon. Who doesn't want a sugar doughnut muffin?
I've also been making lots of cheesecakes lately. Although I don't really like cheesecake that much, I do enjoy making cheesecakes. It's a win-win: I make it and somebody else eats most of it. This recipe was intriguing because it included candied lemons, which I've been wanting to try making for a while. It also has a crust that isn't made out of graham crackers. The question of what to use instead of graham crackers if you're outside the US has been discussed by lots of people (1, 2, 3, 4) so I figured I'd give that a try as well.
With the exception of the candied lemons, both of these recipes were very easy to make (almost). I put together the doffin batter while the cheesecake was baking and still had time to wash the dishes.
The cheesecake had a really nice, light texture. I'm planning to use this recipe and swap out the lemon zest for other flavors (matcha green tea, cocoa, vanilla).
The only snag was that the ingredient list for the cheesecake didn't list the amounts of the ingredients very clearly. The crust is made with biscotti, and the recipe said "12 biscotti". How much is 12 biscotti? I had mini-biscotti instead of full-sized biscotti and I started off using 24 biscotti and then kept adding until there was enough crust to cover the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan. I have fixed the recipe so that it has volume, mass, or weight measurements.
