brownie mosaic cheesecake.

one more for the archives!

last week of school and somebody's birthday so i guess i've been roped in to do my part. what better way to try out recipes that are too extravagant for day-to-day usage?

this time, i made a brownie mosaic cheesecake that i saw on smitten kitchen. that's one amazing blog and i can't get pictures of htat clarity, im afraid. what i can do is attempt to replicate what she does in her kitchen.

this cake is one calorific expedition down the road to cholesterol-filled guilt-ridden obesity and yet i swear that once you have this you WILL not want to stop eating. but that's my opinion. it's really up to you to decide if you still put this in your mouth after you see what's gone in it.

i say: load up on veggies, skip a meal and take a slice.

i used chocolate bourbon creams for my biscuit crust. i ordinarily would use teddy grahams, but those newfangled americanish things aren't quite available here in the uk. not easily anyway, so i used the creams. my helpers for the night were totally lax about removing the cream between the creams HAHAHA so what i did was break them all together, kept the sugar and butter constants the same so texture wouldn't be affected, but added cocoa powder just to up the bitterness and bring it one step away from being far too cloying.

the brownie was later made and baked, left to cool and cubed perfectly. me being me, i placed the brownie cubes in the pan OVER the cocokie crumb in a checkered fashion, only to realise later on that the cheese would cover it all and you can't quite see how it turned out.

a chocolate ganache covered the top and finished the look: mainly by covering the cracks left from not baking the cheesecake in a water bath. but it's perfectly fine. walnuts about the side and that's about it.

a chocolate-cream-cookie-crust with chopped-brownie-cubes covered in creamy-cheesecake.

how does that not sound appealing at all?

unfortunately, i dont have a picture of the inside of the cake, but i swear that can only be a good thing if the description above and the lack of a picture tempts you to bake one yourself jst to see what it can be.

this is adapted from smittenkitchen: you can tell i love this website.


one bowl brownies:
4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 1/4-1/2cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

crumb crust:
1 1/2 cups finely ground cookies (I used bourbon creams. WITH the creams)
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
about 1 tbsp non-Dutch cocoa (just add to your taste. i left the cream in so it was sweeter than i wanted it to be)

cheesecake batter:
3 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar

i halved the brownie and cheesecake batter since my pans are so smalll. for the top i merely used a simple chocolate ganache, nothing too fancy, and set a couple walnuts in just for the pretty.