Cheesecake lab.

I made two cheesecakes today. First I went to Trader Joe's and bought beaucoup cream cheese:

(also flowers, because flowers are de rigeur:)

Anyway, back to cheesecake: they are for my niece's wedding tomorrow. For the first, I made a hazelnut cheesecake, which is suave and delicious. It turned out great. It is beautiful and shapely and altogether swell. For the second cake, I thought I would make a plain flavored one, with a cherry topping that I would make from scratch. While the cakes were in the oven, I did this and that. I rotated them in the oven at an appropriate moment, to promote even baking. But the sad truth of the matter, the people, is that, despite all this diligence and caretaking, (a) I overcooked the plain cheesecake, and (b) that meant there were slightly overcooked edges, and (c) trimming the slightly overcooked edges left me with a sad, non-wedding worthy cake.

Dilemma: Can I somehow dress up this second, sad cheesecake? Can the cherry topping (elegant, dark, delicious) somehow make the sad, shaggy edges of the trimmed non-wedding worthy cake seem less sad and shaggy? Are there, like, delicious and edible draperies to disguise the &c &c &c?

The answer, obviously, is that I have to make another cake. That is, a third cake, that I will not in any way overcook because of today's experience in cheesecake failure.

There is now cream cheese sitting on my counter so that it will be room temperature at 8 a.m. When the re-baking will commence. The bright side, however, is that there is currently in my refrigerator an also-ran cheesecake that will be ours to eat, non-wedding-worthy though it may be.