Sunday 13 May 2012

Double chocolate cheesecake

For our trip to Paris, we'd bought several small snacks to gobble down in a tight moment of hunger, but inevitably these were never eaten, as there are always so much more attractive possibilities at hand (Starbucks, for example). Now one batch of these, "LU Timeout speculaas", had an unfortunate time in the bottom of one of our backpacks, and now all the biscuits have turned into crumbly bits. What a shame, we could say, or better; what an opportunity!
What do you use crumbly biscuits for? Crumbly biscuit cake bases! And what better cake to make than a cheesecake, and what better cheesecake to make than a chocolate cheesecake! Hurrah!
Now I'd never made a chocolate cheesecake before, so I looked at some recipes (you have baked ones, unbaked ones, ones filled with booze or fruits that aren't in season or whatever), and I ended up with the double chocolate cheesecake recipe of the BBC. However, some of the amounts in there didn't work out for Dutch shoppers (you can only buy mascarpone in batches of 250 g, and I didn't want to be left with 50 g of mascarpone which you can't use in anything) and because I think 50 g of butter isn't enough, and because I used a bigger cake tin (24 cm), I adapted the recipe as follows:

Ingredients:
200 g crumbly biscuits (can be digestive, or other crumbly ones)
100 g butter
400g cream cheese
250g mascarpone
300g milk chocolate , melted
100g dark chocolate , melted

Mix the crumbled biscuits with the melted butter. Line the bottom of the spring form tin with baking paper. Press the biscuit mixture into the base of the tin. Set to cool in the oven for about 10 minutes.
Mix the cream cheese with the mascarpone. Fold the milk chocolate into the cream cheese mix and then stir in the dark chocolate so that it looks streaky.
Line the sides of the tin with more baking paper. Spoon the cake mixture into the tin, level the top, and let cool  for at least 2 hours.

"Level the top" they say. It never works.
 Now the whole "stir in the dark chocolate so that it looks streaky" didn't quite work out for me (as it did for most people, looking at the comments on the recipe page), but other than that everything worked fine. The bottom is a bit crumbly, but what do you expect with so many crumbly biscuits?
The taste is great though; chocolaty, rich, with some spices coming through from the speculaas. The harder bits of dark chocolate give it a little bit of a crunch. It is very very heavy though, so while it says 8 portions in the recipe, I've turned it into 12, which just makes the goodness last that bit longer!

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