Chocolate cheesecake!

Along with the bourbon I’m also not so much a coinsurer of cheesecake. I usually go for chocolate cake or carrot cake for dessert. For some reason I decided chocolate cheesecake sounded like a great dessert to make for Easter. I’ve never made cheesecake. Not normal, not chocolate, nor any other type. I have a Hershey’s cookbook on the self in my kitchen. I’m pretty sure I’ve only opened it to drool, and never actually made anything from it so I had no idea if the recipe writer knew what they were doing or was just making things up. I decided to double check the internet to make sure that the recipe was at least close to other cheesecake recipes and I wasn’t being led astray or using some weird combination of cheeses. Fortunately the recipe was sound and off I went on my cheesecake adventure. The recipe is found here.

Lesson learned: allow the cream cheese to come to room temperature. It mixes better that way. Otherwise you need to whip it for a lot longer and continue to scrape down the sides of the bowl and the mixing blade.

The recipe called for instant espresso in the crust. I couldn’t find it at the grocery store. I’ve actually had a hard time finding it the only times I’ve looked for it, but I can always find it when I don’t need it. Go figure. I decided I could do without the espresso flavor. All it does it does is deepen the chocolate flavor, making it a little more like a bitter sweet chocolate crust. I rather enjoyed the sweeter chocolate flavor with the Nilla Wafer base. The complexity of flavor with the combination of chocolate and vanilla plus the ease of grinding up the Nilla Wafers was preferable to me over the alternative of using Oreo cookies as the crust. The issue I have there is that you need to scrape out the frosting in each sandwich. That’s a lot more work than throwing handfuls of Nilla Wafers into the food processor and grinding them to a fine powder and mixing that with powdered chocolate. 

The bonus of making cheesecake: I got to use both my spring form pan and my tamper. I have owned a tamper for years, from when I had an espresso maker (a crappy little thing that made terrible espresso; no pressure pump = bad espresso). It’s been sitting in my utensil drawer for ages with not apparent purpose. Now it has a use! I was able to even out the crust without getting my hands terribly dirty and the crust would be far more even than my finger press method could make it. 

This particular recipe makes a fairly dense cheesecake with a decadently rich chocolate flavor. I may try another type of cheese next time, possibly a mascarpone cheesecake. I’ll need to do some more research. I also need to figure out how to make a cheesecake that will not crack. When it finished cooking it was beautiful and smooth on the top, when it had cooled it cracked, not just right down the middle but in an ugly “Y” shape. I’ve read that a water bath may fix that. I’ll have to find out next time I make cheesecake, which may be a while. Not because it was bad but because my waist line does not need all that sugar and cheesy goodness.

I believe I have now used everything my wonderful family and friends gave us as wedding and shower gifts and I have found I love everything we requested. Thank you all for your love and support. To all my future brides and grooms: Be very careful what you wish for on your registry. People will buy you all of it. That doughnut maker, and the deep fryer, yep you’ll get them. And probably never use them. We were so picky about what we put on our registry, we really tried to choose things we thought we’d actually use on a regular basis.