Extreme Chocolate Cheesecake

1.  I don’t do the fudge cake layer.  Tried it a couple of times with the cake layer, and it just never seemed to mesh well.  Flavors and richness levels were just too drastically different.

2.  I just use plain sugar instead of chocolate sugar.  With 2.5 lbs of chocolate in this recipe I don’t think you can tell the difference.

3.  Use Orea cookies for the crust.  Buy a package of oreos, pull them apart and scrape the cream off with a knife or cheese slicer (the type with a wire makes short work of it).  Crush the Oreos with a meat tenderizer or similar utensil in a gallon freezer bag.  I went hard core and sifted mine thru a strainer and kept dumping the bigger pieces bag into the baggie to crush them some more.  A little time consuming, but the crust comes out perfect and uniform.  Don’t eat too many of the Oreos during this process as it takes almost a full package to get 2.5 cups.

3.  Add the flour and cornstarch last after following the directions above.  I made the mistake of adding the flour, cornstarch, and vanilla at the same time.  The vanilla wicked into the cornstarch and flour and didn’t want to blend in.  Left little specs of brown vanilla throughout the batter.

4.  I don’t temper the chocolate before I add it.  However I add it slowly while the mixer is running on medium low.

5.  Buy GOOD chocolate.  White chocolate chips have extra ingredients to help the chips hold their shape while baking.  This will quickly cause the chocolate to seize up when you are trying to melt it.  Took me three times of seizing it up thinking I somehow screwed up and got some water in it before I did some searching on the internet and figured out my problem.  This last time I used Valrhona 35% White Chocolate, 40% Milk Chocolate, and 70% dark chocolate (In hind sight 70% was too dark and I’ll get 64% next time.  Was able to get all of it from Amazon in wafers in 1 or 2 lbs packages.  Not cheap, but was so worth it with all my previous struggles with chips in the past.  

6.  Get a good instant read digital thermometer.    Don’t try and cook a cheesecake by “feel”, “jiggle” etc.  Cook it until the center hits 150 F.  I like the ones from Thermoworks.  This is the one I have and reads within 2-3 seconds.  The have some cheaper ones around $19 that will read in around 5 seconds.  They work great for grilling meat too.

http://www.thermoworks.com/MTC-KIT

7.  Use a water bath.  Wrap the spring form pan in a single piece of heavy duty tinfoil.  Make sure you get it all the way up the sides.  Then set it in a large roasting pan or deep dish pizza pan and fill with water.  This will keep the outside from overcooking.  I can get my cheesecake to cook without the outside edge puffin up and getting much higher than the center.  You will find some water gets inside the foil, but a good spring form pan is water tight enough that it is not an issue.

8.  When it is done, use a turkey baster and a heat tolerant pot to suck out most of the hot water.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE THE PANS WITH THE HOT WATER IN IT!!!!  Then carefully remove the entire cake and bath from the oven.  Then take the cake out of the water bath and let it slowly air cool on the counter.  If you cook it to 150 and let it air cool it shouldn’t crack.  Cracking is generally a sign of over cooking, cooling to quickly, or both.

9.  I find ganache a bit difficult to frost with as it is either warm enough to get a nice smooth finish, but too runny and runs everywhere, or cool enough to work with but won’t make a smooth surface.  So I cheat.  I wait until it is cool enough to work with and don’t worry too much about the how it looks.  I then take a sharp vegetable peeler and bar of milk chocolate and a bar of white chocolate and make shavings and curls.  Sprinkle chocolate curls and shavings all over the cake and it doesn’t matter if the frosting came out smooth.  Really dresses up the cake.    There are plenty of Youtube videos on making curls and shavings.