Creating Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

This recipe was a collaboration between Mom and I. It was created on a warm and sunny day when we were planning on going for a hike but first had to make dessert as company was coming for dinner. We were looking for something quick so that we could spend more time outside. The recipe itself didn’t take long to make but we spent about an hour looking through cookbooks trying to find something. Mom complained that we could have had the dessert made in the time it took us to choose a recipe. I wasn’t too concerned, I enjoyed reading and looking at recipes. We had three bars of cream cheese in the fridge and we’d been tentatively looking for a cheesecake recipe, but some of them were too elaborate for our time frame and we didn’t have the right ingredients for others. We had 2 blocks of regular cream cheese and 1 block of chocolate cream cheese so we decided to make a swirled cheesecake. Looking on the cream cheese box itself for a recipe, we found that the different cream cheeses offered different recipes so we modified both of them to make our own concoction. The recipe on the plain cream cheese box was for a lemon cheesecake and called for ¼ cup of lemon juice, but I decided I would add a ¼ cup of wild cherry syrup instead to make a pink swirl. We got the whole cake together, put it in the oven, left instructions for my Grandma to take it out when it was done and left for our hike.

Upon our return I found that the cheesecake had a few fairly large cracks. I was disappointed by this, but then I thought of a recent post I saw on Culinary Concoctions by Peabody. As far as I’m concerned she’s a genius with fixing things. I was very impressed with her broken cheesecake remedies. My solution was not nearly as creative but it worked. Actually, it didn’t work quite as planned, but no one really knew except me. I had some milk and white chocolate swirl chips and I thought I could melt and drizzle them over the cracks and still have them retain their swirl. Of course as they melted the white and milk chocolate swirl mixed itself into a light brown colour instead of a pretty light/dark swirl that would have complemented the cherry/chocolate swirl. The chocolate didn’t drizzle as well as I had hoped either, it was a bit globby. The end result was decent though. The cherry flavour wasn’t overly strong, I would perhaps call it ‘cherry scented chocolate cheesecake’. For more cherry flavour next time I might add some additional cherry flavouring or kirsch. And I think I would use dark chocolate as a drizzle on top, it would have had more visual contrast that way, plus I just like dark chocolate better. Overall it’s not bad for a recipe that was hodgepodged together from 2 recipes and 2 people.




Pink Chocolate Cheesecake

Crust:
2 cups graham crumbs
1/3 cup melted butter
¼ cup sugar
Combine everything and then press into a springform pan and bake at 325F for 5 minutes. Let cool.

Cherry Filling:
2, 8oz packages of cream cheese
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup sugar
¼ cup wild cherry syrup
Blend everything until smooth.

Chocolate Filling:
1, 8oz package cream cheese
1 egg
1 tablespoon cocoa
Blend everything until smooth.

When the crust has cooled, pour in ½ cherry filling, then chocolate filling, then the remaining cherry filling. Using a knife, drag it through the fillings to create swirls. Bake in 325F oven for 45-50min. The middle will not be completely set but will continue to do so as it cools. Let cool completely, ~6 hours to overnight.
I added melted chocolate on top to fix cracks. I think a cherry sauce would have been good too, but I would only spoon it onto individual slices because otherwise you’d hide the swirl, and that was the whole point.
Enjoy.


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Baking + Dessert + Cheesecake + Recipe