Double Chocolate Cheesecake

If you are overly restless, here's the recipe in a breeze...

• 24 Oreo Cookies, crushed
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 4 pkg. (225g) Philadelphia Cream Cheese
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 2 tbsp. flour
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• Melted & cooled Semi-Sweet Chocolate
• 2 mashed potatoes/4 tbsp ground flax-seed/4 eggs
• 1/2 cup blueberries

Make It!

• Heat oven to 325ºF. Mix crumbs and butter, press onto bottom of foil-lined pan. Bake 10 min.
• Beat cream cheese, sugar, flour, sour cream and vanilla with mixer until well blended. Add chocolate mix well. Add mashed-potatoes/ground flax-seed/eggs, 1 at a time until blended. Pour over crust.
• Bake 45 min. Cool completely. Refrigerate 5 hours. Use foil to lift cheesecake from pan. Top with berries.

Thanks to Sheetal for pointing out the recipe & giving baking tips and Amy for clearing some last-minute doubts :)
Now, before I proceed...

Though I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I experiment in other aspects of life far more than in my kitchen-life. So let me assure you that I am not planning on converting my blog into a cooking blog, this is one of the few pleasant aberrations to my regular experimentation in life.
Cheesecake is one of the few (or maybe THE ONLY one) American dessert I like. And given I have a sweet tooth, I thought of baking one. I have never baked anything before and so after lot of contemplation and seeking advice from advanced cooks, I jumped off to bake one myself. It turned out pretty delicious and many people asked the recipe, so thought of sharing with the larger audience. Plus, it is not very difficult to make.

Detailed Recipe:

Prep Time: about 60 mins, Total Time: 2hrs (add 5-8hrs to freeze)
Expertise Required: Intermediate
Taste Achieved: Pro-level!
(Special Tip: All you guys out there, this recipe is your perfect chance to impress your girlfriends. Seize it!)

Ingredients:

1. 24 Oreo Cookies, crushed (about 2 cups)
Tip: You can use some other biscuit/cracker if you like, say digestive ones. The thickness of crust doesn't change after baking, so use judgment on how many to crush depending on the thickness of crust you want.
2. 1/4 cup butter, melted
3. 4 pkg. (8oz, approx 225gm) Philadelphia Cream Cheese, softened, i.e. room temp.
4. 1 cup sugar
5. 1/2 cup sour cream
Tip: This is my addition to this recipe. If you concentrate well on the taste while eating a cheesecake, you will notice slight sourness in it. Sour cream is what will give you this nuance of sourness. You can use a few drops of lemon juice instead of sour cream.
6. 2 tbsp. flour
7. 1 tsp. vanilla
8. Semi-Sweet Chocolate, melted, slightly cooled
Tip: Skip this step to get plain traditional Cheesecake. If you want chocolatey taste without brown color, you can use white chocolate (friend's tip). But personally I am NOT a big fan of white chocolate. Hard-core brown chocolate is the way to go.
9. 4 eggs equivalent of potatoes (or ground flax seeds) or if you eat eggs, then take 4 eggs
If you know some good substitutes to egg, please email me or leave a comment here. Please make a suggestion only if you have tried it personally.  I have had success with flax-seed, but limited success with potatoes, guess I didn't smash'em well.
10. 1/2 cup blueberries (sliced strawberries look sexy, or use your favorite fruit)

Action, Making the Crust: You can get one of those ready-made ones from the market: a pie-base, or even Oreos base. But given that it only takes a few minutes to make one yourself, I find making crust at home to be a more exciting option (and leaves some room for your creative juices to flow!) Plus you are not restricted by the sizes of ready-made ones.

1. Pre-heat oven to 325F
2. Crush 24 Oreos in a ziplock bag (guess you can even crush them in a mixer)
Add 1/4 cup melted butter, and mix well.
3. Line your baking pan with Foil and grease it well
4. Press the well-mixed crumbs on the base of the pan
5. Bake it for 10 miuntes
6. Remove from oven and let it cool
Your base is now ready! Set it aside while we make the batter.

Action, Making The Batter:

1. Beat Cream cheese (4pkt), sugar (1 cup), flour (2 tbsp) and vanilla (1 tbsp) until they are blended well
2. Melt your chocolate cubes/pieces, cool it and then slowly mix it with batter
3. Add eggs(ground flax seed + warm water): 1 at a time. Mix the egg well before adding another
4. Add sour cream, this gives a subtle sourness essential for yummy taste
5. Blend everything well, ensuring that there are no air bubbles in the batter.
Tip: If you leave any air bubbles, they will rise and either make your outer crust floppy or form craters on the surface after baking.
6. Pour it over the crust you baked and cooled a while ago
7. Bake for 45-50 mins at 350F
8. When done, cool it completely and then freeze it for 5-8 hours.
9. Remember the foil you put in the pan, now use it to remove the cake easily from the pan!
Tip: Without the foil you would have had to use fancy expensive springform baking pans.

I can't tell you precisely how to know when it is done, but I'm pretty sure if you followed everything, then at the end of 50min baking period, your cheesecake is baked well. Some say, if the center of your cheesecake jiggles when shaken, it is done. But personally, I find it to be a very difficult (and imprecise) test to conduct! Of course, I guess, unless you are already good at baking.

Serving Tip:
Since the cake is creamy, it has a tendency to stick to the knife while cutting. I warm my knife a bit (by dipping it in hot water, or holding over a gas/stove for few seconds) before I cut the cake. That's my personal tip :-) Then, top the slice off with your favorite berry or fruit and enjoy finger-licking tasty Chocolatey Cheesecake. For once, don't bother much about the calories and indulge yourself :) If you think that this isn't enough calories for you, consider adding some cream! Nice hot steaming cup of Jasmine Green Tea makes for a perfect companion to the slice of this choclatey cheesecake.


I followed recipe to the word and I can say that it would be very difficult to get it wrong if you follow it properly. Here's the detailed video demonstrating the recipe I took as a reference: Philly Double Chocolate Cheesecake. My only deviation to this recipe was adding sour cream. (Nit-Pick: I don't know why it is called Double Chocolate Cheesecake, probably because both the crust as well as batter are made of chocolate?)
If you are looking for a lot of hard-core cooking recipes-tips-tricks, then check out my friends' blogs:
0. My Cooking Experiments, by SK
1. Recipes For All Occasions, by Priya
2. I Googled I Saw I Cooked, by Sangeetha