How about a food post? Haven't had one of those for awhile... so why not now? Well, typically when it's one of our birthdays, the other makes a dessert to celebrate. For my birthday last month Leslie made an amazing lemon poppy seed cake - that was perfect for me because I like the mixture of flavors and lightness of something like that. For Leslie, on the other hand, the richer the better. Since we were in Hawaii over her birthday, I didn't get around to making her dessert until we came home. So, to make up for the fact that it was over a week late, I decided to go big - a quadruple chocolate and raspberry cheesecake. What the heck even is that? Amazing is what it is.
I started off with an Oreo crust. Since I didn't want the filling to make the crust all mushy, I removed the filling from a whole package of Oreos and then made the crust out of just the cookies (I bet there are some of you out there who would have loved to have eaten the bowl of filling I had by the end... sorry for not sharing with you). You can probably find just chocolate wafer cookies, but there weren't any at Kroger and I didn't feel like hunting around a bunch of stores, so whatever. The cookies went into the food processor with a bunch of butter to make the crust, which was then formed onto the bottom and sides of the springform pan before getting tossed in the oven for a bit. Now the crust was all ready to receive the goodness that is cheesecake.
All I had to do was throw a bunch of cream cheese, sugar, salt, eggs, sour cream, and melted chocolate into the food processor to make the batter (or is it filling - I suppose it depends on if a cheesecake is a pie or a cake... or neither). That all went into the Oreo crust already set in the springform, which was then wrapped in foil, which was then placed into a water bath, which was then placed in the oven. The magical gas heat of the oven did its job, and an hour later a round piece of deliciousness emerged. This cooled on the counter for another hour before spending the night in the fridge.
The next day, I applied the next level of chocolate (number three, for those of you counting). This came in the form of a dark chocolate and raspberry ganache. This was a simple matter of heavy cream, dark chocolate, butter, and raspberry preserves all coming together. Once the ganache cooled enough, but not too much, it was spread on the cake/pie. The final layer of chocolate was just a white chocolate drizzle (even if white chocolate isn't technically chocolate... just go with it). And there you have it - a quadruple chocolate cheesecake. But wait, there's more! I then took fresh raspberries, sugar, and salt and made a raspberry syrup/sauce to be spooned on as a topping before eating. There was probably enough raspberry in the ganache already, but why not add a bit more?
And that's how you get a quadruple chocolate and raspberry cheesecake. This was my first time making a cheesecake (cheese pie? still not sure what this actually is...) and it turned out pretty nearly perfect. Now I'm partly really looking forward to making another, because it was delicious, and also scared to, because I'll probably mess it up if I try again. I also need a good excuse to make one, since I don't think Leslie and I need to be eating cheesecake on a regular basis (don't worry, we shared this one with people too... so no, we didn't just eat a whole cheesecake ourselves).
So yeah, there you go. And I guess that's it for now. Thanks for reading!
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