Chocolate and Cheese Love Affair

Chocolate was my love at first bite. Then it became my temptation, a craving. It then turns to addiction. We have always been together. It accompanies me when I’m down or celebrate with me when I’m happy.

Chocolate graces in various sweet treats including cookies, muffins, brownies, and of course cake. I even use it in toppings and even include it in my yoghurt. I could never resist a hot chocolate.

Cheese had always been his love. He eats it with practically anything. In eggs, on pasta, pizza, bread, and fish and in of course his most loved dessert – cake.

I wanted to bake cake for J and could not think of any perfect pairing other than chocolate and cheese. Hence a love affair was created. Yes, my love and his love – having affair.

Dark Chocolate Cheesecake

Baking it the first time proved to be hard. First obstacle was I could not find chocolate flavoured digestive biscuits for the base on the original recipe, therefore I googled and used another cheesecake base using digestive biscuits with cocoa powder. Perfect. Then I found that the recipe yielded for 1.2 kg of cheese! The ignorant me thought that one block of cream cheese is enough for all cheesecakes in the world. Therefore I freeze the prepared base and got another block of cheese the next day. Finally I divide everything by 2.4 to get the exact measurement and voila, a short but definitely decadent chocolate cheesecake is made.

120g dark chocolate
500g (2 pkt) Philadelphia cream cheese
83g sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
73ml soured cream
½ tbsp cocoa powder

175g (6oz) digestive biscuits
2.5ml (1/2 tsp) ground cinnamon
15ml (1 tbsp) cocoa powder
75g (3oz) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

Make the base first so it's ready when you need it. Put the biscuits, cinnamon, cocoa into a food blender and break down to a fine crumb. Melt the butter and pour it onto the crumb and mix it in until evenly distributed. Line a spring form tin with baking paper or butter thoroughly and scatter the crumb onto the tin gently, lightly press down and set aside or leave it in fridge.

Preheat oven at 180C. Grease bottom and sides of a 9 X 3 inch springform tin.
Melt chocolate in the top of a double boiler, or heatproof bowl over hot water.
While chocolate is melting, beat cream cheese until smooth, then beat in sugar and vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time.

Stir the soured cream into the cocoa powder to form a paste. Add to the cream cheese mixture. Stir in the melted chocolate.

Pour onto crust. Bake for 1 hour. Let cool in tin; remove rim. Refrigerate before serving.

Serves 4-6

Pardon the picture as I do not have a decent camera and have to make do with my PDA.

This entry could have been fit for SHF-dark chocolate edition, but I guess I can always participate in the next one! Oh I can’t wait. I am also looking forward to many other events especially IMBB.

J reported that he simply love the cake. He might be converting to chocolate-cheese lover soon. I could not deny the same for myself.