Amaretto Fudge Cheesecake with Kahlua Chocolate Cookie Crust and Ganache

This will be my last post for 2015. So my last recipe is a dessert, which I rarely make, made for my family’s 2015 Christmas dinner. So we’ll end the year on a sweet note and as we enter 2016, best wishes to you and your family for the coming New Year. I hope you’ve enjoyed this year’s recipes and I’ll see you next year with more recipe postings.

The origin of this recipe was the Amaretto Fudge Cheesecake recipe from cooking.com, whose site no longer exists. I made this dessert once before (a few Christmas’ ago) more or less as in the original recipe. My 2015 recipe version definitely came out delicious after making changes to the original, which included drastically reducing the amount of sugar in the filling. I’m not a fan of overly sweet desserts, so I add the minimal amount of sugar, but everyone has different tastes, so feel free to add more. When making the cookie crust, I’ve found that it’s sufficient to use the entire sandwich cookie (including the filling, which many recipes have you remove) with added flavoring (in this case Kahlúa) rather than adding any additional sugar or butter. I’ve also found that it’s not necessary to bake the crust before adding the cheesecake filling, which saves a step in making this dessert. Finally I added a visual and tasty flourish to the cheesecake by topping it with a flavored ganache (Kahlúa again and it hides any filling surface defects after baking).

Enjoy!

Cranberry Orange Pumpkin Cheesecake with Chocolate Cookie Crust

I don’t bake very often, but I was asked to bring a dessert to a Thanksgiving gathering. I like pumpkin pie, and since it was Thanksgiving, a pumpkin cheesecake sounded really good. I got inspiration from the Cranberry Orange Cheesecake with Chocolate Crust recipe at the For Two, Please website and the Chocolate Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe by Ethan Howard, pastry chef at Cavallo Point, Sausalito that was published in the local newspaper. Well, the cheesecake turned out to be a hit!

The chocolate cookie crust uses chocolate cookies with a crème filling (the most famous brand in the USA being Oreo – but this is not an Oreo cookie recipe!). After separating the cookies from the crème filling, the filling is usually discarded (or eaten!). So I had the wild idea to use the filling in the crust to help bind the crushed cookie pieces together. Well, I tried it and it worked. Since the filling already has sugar in it, I didn’t add any sugar to the cookie crumbs. I did have to add some oil (or melted butter) since there wasn’t enough of the filling to bind all the crumbs together.

You need to make the cheesecake and the filling the night before you want to eat it, so plan ahead!

Enjoy!