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Hey, I'm John Canel and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a deliciously decadent chocolate cheesecake. So, let's get started. First off, preheat your oven to 350 so it's nice and hot. And now, in the bowl of your food processor, we're going to add 24 Oreos or 270 g. Pop your lid on. And we're going to pulse this for about 30 seconds until it's basically the texture of sand. Wet chocolate sand. After about 30 seconds of pulsing, you'll have a nice fine sandy texture. You just don't want to have any big clumps. To hold this together, we're going to add four tablespoon of melted butter. That's 56 g. Just drizzle it in while you pulse.
Now, we're going to give it a check. The test is to grab a spoonful. Never put your hand in a food processor, pop that onto your palm, squeeze it, and it should hold together. If that's not happening, drizzle in one extra tablespoon of butter. This looks great, though. Transfer your crumbs to a 9-in spring form pan, and then we can get to pressing. Give that a shimmy. You want to grab a flat bottomed cup. out and just press down the base and one inch up the side. And you can start off by just smooshing some over towards the side to kind of rough this out before you begin pressing really hard.
Once your crumbs are mostly in place, you can get to pressing them down. And with the flat bottomed cup, don't just press because you'll lift the Oreos up like that. You're gonna press and turn. So, press and turn and that way they won't stick to your cup. This cake, by the way, oh my goodness, it's so good. Chocolate is such a strong flavor that you need to one add something creamy so you can really get every bit of flavor out, but two add a contrasting flavor. Here we're going to have sour cream and cream cheese, which gives you a lovely tang that compliments it so well. You're going to be shocked.
Nicely pressed. This is so easy because of all the cream in the Oreos. It really works with the butter to hold the crumbs together. This goes into the oven 350 for 10 minutes. It'll be fragrant and nice and firm. In you go. As soon as your crust comes out of the oven, reduce the temperature to 300 because this cheesecake will bake low and slow. High heat is guaranteed to ruin the texture of your creamy, beautiful cheesecake. While the crust is in the oven, we can make the filling. Starting with the chocolate. We're not using cocoa powder in this recipe. We're using a combination of bittersweet and semieet chocolate. 8 oz of bittersweet and 4 oz of semieet. We do need to chop this.
By the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every single week. Give this a nice chop. We want even small pieces, nothing giant because this will be melted. You don't want giant pieces like this just because they'll take so long to melt. So, everything should be smallish. The bittersweet chocolate will give us so much chocolate flavor and really pair well with the sour cream and the cream cheese. And the semieet chocolate is a little sweeter and we want our cake to be perfectly sweet, which is why we're using that combination.
Okay, this looks great. So, we're going to transfer it to a heat proof bowl and melt it with some delicious coffee. The coffee is not going to make this taste like a mocha cake. The coffee is just going to amp up the chocolate flavor. And if you're anti- coffee, I understand you could use hot water instead and the cake is still going to be delicious. It'll still be a lovely chocolate cheesecake. To my chocolate, I'm adding 1/4 cup of hot coffee or espresso if you'd like. Give us a little bit of a mix. Clearly, this needs some more help. 10 to 20 second burst in the microwave, stirring in between until it's nice and smooth. In you go.
Once your chocolate's nice and smooth, you can set it aside. And one word of caution, don't try and microwave this until like the very last piece of chocolate is melted. Set it aside and the residual heat will melt that little last bit of chocolate. You don't want this mixture to break. It just becomes less luscious that way. So, let the residual heat do the work. Now, in the bowl of your stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, we're going to add three 8 oz packages of room temperature cream cheese. This should be nice and soft. Cheesecake is so easy to make, but one of the frustration points comes in cheesecake that cracks. The cracking will happen for a couple different reasons. One,
your mixture won't be fully mixed. If your cream cheese was too cold, you'll have little dots of it hanging out. Not great. You also don't want to beat too much air into the mixture. So, you'll never have a recipe that tells you to mix on high. That's not good. Low and slow is the way to go. And you can see this cream cheese is soft and it's going to mix really well. Pop your paddle on and we're going to mix this on medium speed for 2 minutes until it's nice and creamy. After 2 minutes, we can add the sugar in. 1 cup or 200 g of granulated, one cup of sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt.
You also want to just take your spatula and shift stuff down. rides up and it never gets fully mixed up on top. And if you don't do this regularly throughout the process of making your batter, you'll have little nodules of cream cheese you're trying to mix in at the very end and it just gives you those dots that are frustrating. I want a smooth, luscious, silky batter. Can also scrape the bowl down too if you want. After about a minute of mixing, you'll see your cream cheese looks so much softer. The sugar dissolves and it really changes the texture as well as sweetening. Sour cream is the secret
ingredient here. We're only using a/4 cup, but it does so many things. It'll lighten the batter, less sweetness, a little bit of extra tang, and it pairs so well with the chocolate. Actually, I have a chocolate sour cream frosting recipe that's delicious. That was 14 of a cup or 60 g. Continue scooching things down the paddle. While that mixes, let's crack our eggs into a bowl. Okay, you want four large room temperature eggs here. No shells, please. While mixing on medium low, we're going to add the eggs in one at a time. And will you be mixing? Yes. Will you be scraping the bowl down in between? You should.
Yeah. Already I see this is very soupy in the middle, but on the bottom it's quite stiff. So, let's scrape the bowl down. The goal here is to have a nice homogeneous mixture. It's the same all the way through. Now I have a soupy mixture that's yellow in the middle, but the outside is a totally different color because it's not mixed all the way. So grab your spatula and just give it a scrape. I will say if you don't do all the extra steps in here, your cheesecake is still going to be a delicious chocolate cheesecake. There's just a little bit of room for improvement. And since we're spending our time and all these ingredients, I want to be the best
cheesecake it could. Okay, last egg. This looks so lovely. It's a cheesecake. Let's add the chocolate in to make it a chocolate cheesecake. At this point, by the way, the chocolate's just warmish. It's not hot anymore. You're going to mix this until it's fully combined. And we will scrape the bowl down one last time. And by the way, since we haven't added any flour in yet, this can get mixed for quite a while. You're not going to have any worries about it being overmixed as long as the speed is nice and medium low. This is such a lovely color on the inside. On the outside is quite pale. So, let's get a good scrape.
It smells so lovely. I know what this cheesecake tastes like. It's unforgettable. Now, this is delicious, but I want a little bit of structure to help hold the cheesecake together. So, we're going to use a dash of flour. And I'm going to sift this in because I don't want any lumps. So, grab a little sifter. And we want three tablespoons of flour. I'll do this by hand. So, just a little bit of sifting and some mixing. And that way I won't have any big lumps of flour. I find that if the mixer is running and I'm trying to like just pop that in like this, it's a bit too much. So just mix it by hand and you have so much more control. Anyways, last bit of flour goes in. And just like that, we're ready to pour this
beautiful, silky, homogeneous batter into our prepared crust. Look at that. Transfer that delicious chocolate batter in. What you'll notice is the chocolate's really changed the texture of the cheesecake. It's already started to set up because that chocolate is cooled. Give your cheesecake a shimmy. And now we're going to smooth this out into a nice even layer. My cheesecake is almost ready to go into the oven. I want to tent it so it doesn't get too hot on top. Grab some foil.
Okay, this goes into the oven 300° tented for 1 hour along with some hot water in a pan at the very bottom of your stove. The steam will just give you a nice more even bake. After 1 hour, remove the tenting and cook for an additional 40 to maybe 50 minutes. Puffed at the edge. It'll appear matte. And if you see any cracking, turn the oven off. Once your oven's off, crack the door open with a wooden spoon and just let your cheesecake sit there for one additional hour to slowly cool down. If you take it out right away, the change in temperature will make your cheesecake crack. Is that the end of the world? No. We're going to cover up the top. So, don't worry if that happens. It's just a best practice.
Right. With that being said, in you go. Once your cheesecake has spent that hour cooling in the oven, bring it out and let it cool for an additional hour on the countertop so it comes to room temperature. Then cover loosely and refrigerate overnight so it's fully set up and ready to cut with ease. Once your cake is chilled, we can make a silky ganache by combining half a cup of semieet chocolate chips with 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream. This gets microwaved for 35 seconds, so it's nice and warm. Just pour that over the chocolate chips. Stir this together until it's melted and smooth. If you got distracted and this cream cooled down, feel free to put this back into the microwave. Half power for
30 second bursts. Just stir and it'll be nice and smooth. All right, once almost all of the chocolate is melted, just set this aside for about 5 minutes. It'll cool down and the residual heat will finish melting off any little tiny pieces of chocolate you see. In the meantime, grab your favorite cake plate and your cheesecake. We can dismount it and get it ready for the ganache. My cheesecake baked up beautifully. If yours had a little crack, it's totally fine. The ginache will hide all of that. Transfer the ginache onto your cheesecake. And now just spread it out into a beautiful even layer with an offset spatula.
All right, just got some good coverage. You can have it drip over the side or stay in the center. It's up to you. I'm going to transfer this to the fridge so the ginache has some time to chill out and set. It'll set pretty quickly because the cheesecake is so cool, though, so it only needs a few minutes. While it sets, we'll make some whipped cream. Once your ganache is set up, we can make a lovely chocolate whipped cream. It's so good and easy. 1 cup of cold, heavy cream goes right into your mixer. You could also do this with a big bowl in a hand mixer if you prefer.
1/4 of a cup of powdered sugar. That's about 30 g. 1 teaspoon of vanilla. And now we can sift in the cocoa powder. 1 tbsp of cocoa powder will give us a lovely chocolate flavor and um it also helps stabilize the whipped cream. Mix this up on medium speed. You want nice stiff peaks, but it's still going to be smooth. It's not grainy. You can scrape the bowl then if there's something hanging out on the edge. Back to mixing. Once you have soft peaks forming, you can stop your mixer and finish it off by hand. It's really the best way to have full control of your whipped cream.
Like this is almost ready, but not quite. So just mix it up So good. Grab a large piping bag and your favorite closed star tip. And we're going to pipe a beautiful rope. You could also do doll-ups if you want. You could also cover this completely and swoop it up. Either way, it's going to be delicious. Okay, grab your cake and you're going to pipe little spirals as you turn to get that rope. Just like that. Your cheesecake will last up to a week in the fridge. Cover loosely. It's best if the whipped cream is on just before serving, but honestly with the cocoa powder, it shouldn't weep and it should hold really nicely. That
looks too cute. And I love the contrast of colors from the medium to the dark to the light brown. Give your cheesecake a slice. And just like that, it's ready to enjoy. Lachlan. Yes. Would you like a piece of this chocolate cheesecake? I would want a piece. I would want the whole thing. Well, let's start with the piece. Oh, I hope you meant piece. Like piece. All right. Take a forkful. How does that taste? Very good. It is pure chocolate decadence dissolves on your tongue in the most pleasant way. And the cream cheese chocolate combination unmatched. I hope you get a
chance to make this delicious recipe. And if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my cheesecake playlist.
