When baking a cheesecake, I thought you had to put the cheesecake baking dish inside a bigger dish with water coming up to the sides but obviously not enough to fill the cheesecake baking dish so that way the sides won't burn?
in a springform pan, yes. But I wanted it in a 9x13 so I'd have enough for more people. So a recipe I saw said to put a pan of water in with the cheesecake and then slowly cool it when done. And the whole point is to keep it from cracking down the middle - which I actually didn't have! The problem was scaling up the springform recipe (springform holds about 2/3rds of what a 9x13 does) instead of just using the 9x13 one that made what appeared to be a thin layer of the delicious part. Plus the recipe had milk in it, I'm not doing that again. Too many eggs and needing too long to cook (resulting in top too dark).
DH said the same, that it tastes like a souffle. It's not dense at all.