Brownie Mosaic Cheesecake

This is a recipe we made for our most recent dinner group evening. It was a hit. It's adapted from SmittenKitchen, but of course, Deb (of SmittenKitchen) had already adapted it herself from other sources. Now, I've acknowledged Deb, and I'll acknowledge everybody that she acknowledged.

The recipe looks like it's complicated and demanding. It's not really. There are a lot of steps but none are difficult or fidgety. You can bake the brownies the day before and have them ready to cut. I would say that putting together this blog post, with pictures, italics and bold text, was far more fidgety than making the cheesecake...and it turned out looking a lot more amateurish and a lot less appealing.

You need a springform pan for this recipe, which is somewhat specialized, but not especially expensive.

Part One: One Bowl Brownies
Adapted from Baker’s One Bowl Brownies

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate (Baker’s chocolate, optional of course)
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 3/4cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 13×9-inch baking pan with foil, with ends of foil extending over sides of pan. Grease foil.

Microwave chocolate and butter in large microwaveable bowl on high for 2 minutes, or until butter is melted. Stir until chocolate is completely melted. Stir in sugar. Blend in eggs and vanilla. Add flour and salt; mix well. Spread into prepared pan.

Bake 30 to 35 minute or until toothpick inserted in center comes out with fudgy crumbs. (Do not overbake.) Cool in pan on wire rack. Remove brownies from pan, using foil handles.

Cool brownies, then cut* them into 3/4- to 1-inch squares for use in the cheesecake. You will have much more than the two cups of cubes, loosely measured, than you will need, and I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to decide for yourself what to do with the extra (I actually halved the brownie recipe and baked it in a nine inch square pan and there were still extra brownies). Add cubes to cake batter as directed below. This brownie recipe bakes up thin and a bit hard, but once it is in the cheesecake it is ultra soft and yummy.

* I find that brownies are fantastically easy to cut once they’ve been refrigerated–you end up with nice clean lines, and in this case, a sharp pizza wheel was especially helpful (I found that a knife was easier to use).

Part Two: Crumb Crust
Adapted from Gourmet, 1999

I like an extra thick crumb crust. I can’t get enough cookie. Below are proportions for one crust. I made 1 ½ recipes of it. It tastes good and multiplying fractions will keep your brain agile. You know you wanna. As Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing is…wonderful.”

1 1/2 cups or 5 ounces finely ground cookies such as chocolate wafers. Or Chocolate Teddy Grahams.
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt

Stir together crust ingredients and press onto bottom and 1 inch up side of a buttered 24-centimeter springform pan. Fill right away or chill up to 2 hours.

Part Three: Cheesecake
Adapted from the Three Cities of Spain Coffeehouse

3 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup sugar
2 cups brownie cubes (from recipe above)

Make crumb crust as directed above for 24-centimeter cheesecake. Preheat oven to 350°F.

Make filling and bake cake: Beat cream cheese with an electric mixer until fluffy and add eggs, 1 at a time, then vanilla and sugar, beating on low speed until each ingredient is incorporated and scraping down bowl between additions.

Fold brownie cubes in very gently and pour mixture into prepared pan. Put springform pan with crust in a shallow baking pan. Pour filling into crust and bake in baking pan (to catch drips) in middle of oven 45 minutes, or until cake is set 3 inches from edge but center is still slightly wobbly when pan is gently shaken. When I took it out at this point, mine was a little underdone in the center. Next time I would bake it a little longer, maybe until barely wobbly. Cool to room temperature. When completely cool, top with following glaze.

Part Four: Ganache Glaze
Adapted from Purdy’s original recipe

3 ounces bittersweet chocolate, broken up, or 1/2 cup chocolate morsels
2 ounces butter
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon confectioners sugar



Grind the chocolate into powder in the food processor (I skipped this step because I used chocolate morsels. Even if you use fancy-schmancy chocolate, I think you could chop it up with a knife and get good results. The food processor seems like overkill to me), scald the butter and cream in a saucepan (or in a Pyrex cup in the microwave). With the machine running, pour the hot cream/butter mixture slowly through the feed tube onto the chocolate. Blend until completely smooth, stopping machine to scrape down sides once or twice. Add the extract and sugar and process until smooth. Spread over cheesecake while ganache is still warm. Chill until ready to serve. Cut the cheesecake while it's still very cool. Wipe the blade of the knife between cuts (I suggest that you wipe the blade of the knife with your finger, then lick your finger.), then dip it in a little warm water and clean it with paper towels. That will give you nice, clean cuts.

I did not make my ganache in a food processor at all, but just carefully melted the chocolate and butter in a pyrex measuring cup in the microwave, added the cream and powdered sugar and vanilla and whisked until smooth. It was very easy to do it that way and I strongly suggest it.

By the way, this is a very rich desert. It will serve twelve people and make them very happy.

Just checkin'

Well I've never blogged anything in my life (that was worth a crap) so here I go! Let's see if it works. :) The website I use the most for food-making is allrecipes.com. One of the recipes I utilize a lot is Black beans and Rice, which is delish, and everyone reading this blog can eat it, woot! I usually dice up a few jalapenos and cook them with the rice. The second time I made it, I put too many in there and had to drown it in sour cream to eat it. In the reviews on the site, many people added other things (can of tomatoes, more cumin, garlic powder, whatev). The recipe says it serves 10. Guess it depends how hungry you are.

Ingredients

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3/4 cup uncooked white rice
• 1 1/2 cups low sodium, low fat vegetable broth
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 3 1/2 cups canned black beans, drained

Directions

1. In a stockpot over medium-high heat, heat the oil. Add the onion and garlic and saute for 4 minutes. Add the rice and saute for 2 minutes.
2. Add the vegetable broth, bring to a boil, cover and lower the heat and cook for 20 minutes. Add the spices and black beans.

elise, you go girl! woo, woo, woo!

elise, i just called on your phone and left a message, but i thought id go ahead and test out this blogger stuff.

when i suggested the google docs thing, i had never actually used it. i heard it was great for collaboration, and assumed you could make comments and add markups. after using docs, i feel like the living document idea is cool, in that many people can edit something and it keeps a change-log, but there is no real way to organize the various entries.

ultimately when i suggested we do a living cookbook like this, i wanted to see three things:
1) easy interface for inputting text and adding pictures so people would actually add recipes
2) concise way to make comments/suggestions as others try the recipe and add their personal touch (or even if the contributor mixes things up one night and likes the results)
3) easy organization

in just the 10 minutes i took to compare the two, blogger kicks google docs' rump on all accounts. the interface for google docs is great if youre working on a group paper, but not for having a recipe and letting people make comments. commentors would have to change font/color, in order to distinguish from the original recipe. every time you make a recipe, you need to send an email to everyone telling them that they all have access to your doc (which would rough up inboxes everywhere). and the list goes on but im already tired of hearing myself talk, so ill spare the other reasons why i didnt like it, and just focus on the positives of blogger, and ways we can make it work for us.

the third bullet is, in my opinion, the most crucial aspect of my three "wants" i outlined above. i have seen other nerdy tech blogs and noticed they used the tag/label feature. the bottom of this text input window has a text field called "Labels for this post" where you can add tags. the way i think we should do it (just my opinion, and not the final say, just chime in on the comments if you think it should be done differently) is by adding a set of semi-standard tags. lets use some brownies that annie made recently as an example (recipe to follow). they are chocolate with peanut butter frosting (de-LISH). in this case, the tags would be: dessert, brownies, easy (and if we have any other chocoholics out there, we can tag chocolate too). hopefully this tagging system works. itd be the ultimate cookbook because then you dont have to try to remember which category your recipe falls under in the index - it should just be a keyword away. the standard for tagging could be: meal type (breakfast, lunch dinner, dessert, snack), dish type (soup, salad, pasta, italian, vegetarian...), major ingredients/components (chicken, egg noodles, basil) and difficulty level (easy, medium, hard, or wait till tawn and jacqueline make it). that way we could all search each others' recipes fairly easily. ideally there would be a way to activate a column on the right that has all the tags/labels for easy reference (as ive seen before), but that might be something you, elise, have to activate, being the site creator (i dont know how blogger works). the default timeline is interesting, but i think the tagging will be the bread and butter of organization in this living recipe book.

also, i just want to say thank you elise for doing this. you beat my lazy rear-end to the punch. it looks great, and your nastily titled recipe sounds tasty. i dont think we need to "pretty it up" too much. as a matter of fact, i think a little k-i-s-s (keep it simple stupid) is nice in this crazy world of ours. one thing i will suggest, however, is that we work a "tahini bit" on a new title. no offense, but i want something like moomy (without being moomy) where everyone who knows what the blog title means is "in" and outsiders are left wondering if we are speaking some sort of tolkien language. also, it would be great if it were as absurd/provocative/punny as possible so it could be a convo starter and we would sound cool while we bragged about our familys recipe blog. once again elise, ya done good (food).

just my $0.02.

ps: just in case someone from a major publisher stumbles upon our blog, we might want to put where we got the recipe should we get it from a book or website.

FOOD BLOG

hey everyone, just wanted to try out the recipe blog idea. i'm not great at making blogs look cool or anything, so if we end up doing this, someone else can be in charge of that. also, i can invite you all via email to be members/contributors that way anyone can post anytime.

so here's a really basic recipe just because i have nothing else to do right now. steve and i found a recipe website that we like pretty well called simplyrecipes.com. last spring i made some banana bread using their recipe and really liked how it turned out, so i'll share (even though i know most of us probably already have a recipe for banana bread). i made it when steve had swine flu, so we'll call it:

SWINE FLU BANANA BREAD

INGREDIENTS

3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed

1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

METHOD
No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F. With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.

*the bananas i used were actually pretty over ripe and had been in my freezer for a while, but it still turned out great. every time i have bananas that are going to go bad now, i stick them in the freezer and then make this recipe whenever i have time. works every time.