Fresh Goat Cheese Cheesecake with Honey and Figs

Start with the cheese. Find a farmer who makes fresh chèvre, the kind that comes wrapped in paper and smells faintly of the pasture. This is not the crumbly aged goat cheese you sprinkle on salads. You want something soft, bright, and alive with tang. The aliveness of the cheese becomes the soul of this cake.

Figs arrive in late summer with almost no warning. One week the trees are heavy with hard green fruit, and the next the figs are splitting with sweetness, demanding to be eaten that day. Black Mission figs have the deepest flavor, their purple-black skins giving way to crimson flesh. Kadota figs are gentler, honey-colored through and through. Either will work, but they must be ripe.

This is not a dense, heavy New York cheesecake. The goat cheese keeps things lighter, almost mousse-like, with a pleasant tang that cuts through the sweetness. A drizzle of local honey and those roasted figs on top are all you need. Getting out of the way is the whole point here. Let things taste of what they are.