Marble Cheesecake

It’s my birthday.

I’ve saved the best dessert for last. The piece de resistance if you will.This is the dessert that everyone in my family has on their birthdays because it’s just that good.

It’s cheesecake.

Marbled with chocolate.

Oh, yeah.

This recipe is adapted slightly from a Woman’s Day recipe.

Start with the crust.

You need chocolate wafer cookies. These things are so good. I would just eat them plain. I didn’t measure this time– you need about 2/3 of the package.

Pulse them in a food processor or blender until they’re fine crumbs. You can also put them in a zip top bag and pound them with a rolling pin, but it takes longer.

Then, in a large microwavable bowl, melt 1/4 cup each butter & semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips.

Then add the cookie crumbs (1 1/4 cup) and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.

Press it evenly into the bottom and up the sides of a springform pan.

I have the absolute worst springform pan ever, hence the excessive amounts of foil. That’s just to keep it from leaking all over my oven and causing the house to smoke up. But, if you have a decent springform pan, by all means skip the foil all together. Chill the crust while you make the filling.

In the bowl of an electric mixer place 12 oz. cream cheese, 1/2 cup sugar, and the zest of one lemon. Beat on low speed with the paddle attachment (if you have one) until well mixed.

Add 2 eggs, and beat again, scraping down sides of the bowl until it’s thoroughly combined.

Then mix in 1 1/2 cups sour cream.

Let me make a note here. This recipe will work best if all your ingredients are room temperature. I remembered this for the cream cheese and eggs, but I forgot to take the sour cream out of the fridge long enough for it to warm up. I later regretted it.

Once the sour cream is stirred in, it will look something like this.

Then take 8 oz. semisweet or bittersweet chocolate (chips, or chop bars) and microwave at 30-second intervals until melted.

Yum.

Ok, so I have this problem. This recipe is always delicious, but I have trouble sometimes making it look as pretty as it tastes. Cuz this stuff tastes really pretty. So I had this great idea to change how I marbelized the chocolate into the cheesecake. The original recipe says to mix the chocolate into the cream cheese mixture with a fork until marbelized, then pour it into the crust. But when I’ve done this in the past, I have a hard time getting it to marbelize well throughout the whole filling without overmixing it to the point where it’s not marbelized.

So I had this great idea to marbelize it in the pan. I poured half the cream cheese mixture into the crust.

Then put half the chocolate in, and marbelized it with a fork. I realized it was hard to marbelize out to the edges without compromising the crust. Then I repeated it with the second half of the ingredients.

Unfortunately, since the cream cheese mixture was colder than it should have been, when the chocolate mixed in, it got kind of firm. And so using a fork to marbelize made the top very uneven. And when I tried to smooth it out with a spatula, it totally wrecked the marbelized pattern on the top. Whoops.

Bake the cheesecake at 350˚ for about 45 minutes or until it’s just barely jiggly.

So the top doesn’t look that great, but the inside? Delicious.

This cheesecake is beyond delicious. As in, I grew up having it 5 times a year for all of our birthdays and have never ever gotten sick of it. And I’m not sure I could ever turn down a piece.

Doesn’t it just call to you?

“Eat me! You know you want to. Don’t try to resist. Just come in a little closer… that’s it…”

I apologize for introducing you to something so tempting.

Wait, no I don’t.

You’ll thank me after you have a bite.