Churro Cheesecake Bites for Ship Breakers

“Nailer was surprised to see that Lucky Girl was on the verge of tears. Even Sloth hadn’t cried when she’d been kicked down the beach with knife slashes through her crew tattoos, but here this soft girl was on the verge of crying because she’d been caught in a lie.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker, page 161

This was the first dystopian novel I'd ever read that made me sit back and say, "this could happen." It's set in the not-so-distant future, where the rich are incredibly rich, and the poor (most of the country) are forced to do horrible things just to survive.

Kids, like our protagonist, work all day long instead of going to school, because that's more important. The main job available: breaking down old ships.

We start the book off by following Nailer on his job with the light crew.

"Heavy crews peeled away iron panels with acetylene torches and sent them wafting off to the sides like palm leaves, crashing to the beach sands below, where more crews dragged the scavenge above high tide. Light crews like Nailer's tore at the ship's small fittings, stripping copper, brass, nickel, aluminum, and stainless steel. Others hunted for hidden petrol and ship pockets, bucketing out the valuable fluid" (5).

Nailer and his crew talk about kids that have died. One fell through a rusted duct into an oil tank and drowned. Accidents happen all the time.

Nailer and Pima are two of the only kids that regularly have to wash black dust out of their ragged, barely working, hand-me-down masks—most kids don't have masks at all, and breathe that black in all day, every day. 

I wanted to make a donut for this book. For the ships that these people spend their lives scavenging from. I wanted a sturdy shell and a soft inside that threatened to give way to it's liquid center.

Because the story is set in the Gulf of Mexico, obvious from the multiple mentions of "Orleans" (an Orleans Surge and Orleans II, for example), I decided to roll the donut in cinnamon and sugar to make it taste like a churro.

It took me a while to figure out what to do with the filling, though. In the end, I decided to bring in a bit of "Swank" as a nod to Lucky Girl, who Nailer and Pima meet after the hurricane. Cheesecake is rich and decadent, and, in my family, valuable.

Regular cheesecake is incredibly heavy and hard to fill donuts with, so I made a no-bake cheesecake for the filling.

Donuts

-2 c  all-purpose flour

-2 tsp  white sugar

-1/2 tsp  salt

-2 1/2 tsp  baking powder

-6 tbsp  unsalted butter, cold and cubed

-3/4 c  milk (I used 2%, but you can used 1% or whole)

-canola oil to fry them

1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder.
2. Using your fingers, crumble the butter into the flour mixture until all of the chunks are gone and the flour looks crumbly.
3. Add the milk and knead it in.
4. Place the dough on a floured surface, and put a sprinkle of flour on top of it. You want to be able to knead the dough and roll it out, without it sticking to your fingers, BUT you also don't want to add too much flour, so add the flour slowly and stop as soon as the dough stops being sticky.
5. Roll the dough out. It should be at least 1/2 inch thick! If you roll it out too thin, you won't be able to stuff them. 
6. Using a greased biscuit cutter or cup, cut circles out of the dough.
7. Heat the oil up to 350 degrees. This is important! You need to use a thermometer and keep an eye on the temperature. If you don't, the donuts will either burn or be under-cooked. I prefer to use a tall cast-iron pot, too, to stop the oil from splashing all over the stove. You can always use a regular pot though (just not non-stick!).
8. One at a time, add the dough to the hot oil, being careful not to splash grease on yourself. You can put a few at a time into the pot, but be careful not to over-crowd it.
9. Once the donut starts looking golden brown, flip it. It should only take 1-3 minutes for each side.
10. Take the donuts out of the oil and put them on a paper towel to get rid of all of the excess grease.
11. Let them cool a little so you don't burn your fingers or cook the cream cheese when you fill them.

No-Bake Cheesecake Filling

-1 1/2 bricks (12 oz) of cream cheese, softened

-3/4 c  powdered sugar

-1 1/2 tsp  vanilla extract

1. Beat the cream cheese until it's smooth.
2. Mix in the vanilla extract.
3. Whisk the powdered sugar in, making sure all of the lumps are gone.
4. Put the mixture into a pastry bag or a cookie press. I used a cookie press this time because I don't have the sharp tip in the picture for my pastry bags (yet), and you need it to poke through the side of the donut.
5. Push the tip into each donut and fill them with cheesecake until it starts running back out.

Coating

-1 c  white sugar

-2 tsp  cinnamon

1. Mix the cinnamon and sugar together on a plate or in a shallow bowl.

Roll the filled donuts in the cinnamon mixture, and start eating. Donuts are never good after a few hours, let alone the next day, so you should really eat them all before then... it shouldn't be a problem.

The cheesecake, if there's any leftover, will still be good for a few days.

If there's any leftover.

As in, if you don't eat whatever is left after filling the donuts.

(Guess what I did.)