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I think the easiest way to put it is: There are many different cheesecakes.
None of them are "difficult", but some are pretty darn COMPLICATED.
And there's a difference between 'difficult' and 'complicated' when it comes to
recipes for food.
Making a great stir-fry in a single wok; making a great masala dish with fresh spices
added one at a time to the hot oil...those tasks are DIFFICULT.
Because you can't do them just by following some recipe; you need years of experience
to do it right.
Cheesecakes, on the other hand, don't require all that experience.
Some are pretty complicated, requiring lots of specialized equipment
and hours of prep time, but even those will come out OK if you follow the recipe.
The first real cheesecake I ever baked was one of the more difficult ones,
requiring some long resting times, a springform pan and a water bath.
But it was every bit as good as when I had it at the four-star restaurant
that the recipe came from.
So, I guess I'd say "YES". Cheesecake is easy. Pick a good recipe,
follow it carefully, and you'll make a great cheesecake.
The ONE thing you should be aware of when baking the cheesecakes that
call for the waterbath method- your cooking time will vary from the recipe.
That waterbath is -THE- controlling factor in the internal heatflow of your oven,
so unless you have the same pan with exactly the same amount of water
as the person who wrote the recipe, your cooking time will be different.
(WARNING- boring personal anecdote ahead!)
The last cheesecake I made was a water-bath chocolate cheesecake with a
chocolate-chip-cookie-dough bottom crust, and it took a good 30 minutes
longer than the recipe said it would.
That's where personal judgement comes in. I had made some serious alterations
to a standard recipe, and I expected that those changes might throw things off abit...
so I let it bake until it "looked like cheesecake" to me.
When the oven timer went off, the batter was the same color as when poured
and the center still moved like water when I jiggled the oven rack.
So, I kept baking and checked it every 5 minutes. At +15 minutes, it was still the
same. But at +20 minutes, it had started to rise and the center no longer rippled.
At +25 minutes, the sides had begun to separate from the pan and turn brown.
At +30 minutes, the surface was a full inch above original batter level,
and was firm & golden with minute shallow creases beginning to form.
THAT finally "looked like cheesecake" to me.
So I turned off the oven and cracked the door to let it cool slowly.
(Baked Cheesecake isn't really a 'cake', it's a variant of the Custard family;
and cooling it too quickly can crack the top as badly as baking too quickly. )
20 minutes later, it had shrunk back to batter level, so I pulled it out
to let it cool at room temp.
And it was amazingly good.
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