Recently the dr bob team eagerly acquired a newly published cheesecake book with a high density of beautiful photos to add to our already enormous selection of such specialty recipe books. But when it came down to choosing something that resonated with that inner cheesecake alarm, no bells went off. Maybe we need some food psychotherapy to overcome our hidden cheesecake demons. Nahhh...
So this Christmas we looked inside our sugar addicted imagination to try a simple variation of our standard base that would bring on the satisfied customer response from those in our inner cheesecake circle. We'd gone from losing track of where they keep the Nabisco chocolate wafers in supermarket shelve strategy (no longer with the rest of the cookies, usually) to buying the Oreo cookie crumbs ready to use for chocolate cookie crumb crusts back to rediscovering the chocolate wafers when our supply ran low and the supermarket was out of stock and a helpful store employee said why not just get the wafers and crumb them. Because we are lazy? But without any alternative other than wasting time stalking the user friendly crumbs in a series of other stores, we bought into the logic. Of course we had to add in hazelnut crumbs to maintain our loyalty to our favorite cheesecake nut additive.
We've been interested in espresso and cappuccino cheesecake recipes, and have had major success with a real labor intensive version of the latter, but until this experiment, were not inspired by what we had read. Of course, only by trying can one really know, but with limited opportunities to try, the choice is critical. Having acquired a new upscale Kahlua product Especial®, this seemed to be the simple substitution we could make to our hazelnut starter recipe together with mini-chocolate chips and some artfully dribbled caramel sauce garnishing of the simple sour cream topping.
Since this effort had to supply a Christmas gift and a couple of dinner desserts, we went with a 6 package (=3 lb) cream cheese recipe, which is 50 percent more than the standard 4 package (=2 lb) recipe, and by eye split it among two 8 in pans and a 9.44 in (=24 cm) pan, using the extra crumbs for a low side crust, adequate since only about 4/10 the total went into the bigger target pan compared to maybe 3/10 apiece in the smaller ones, leading to a lower than standard height cake (about a 2.5 package recipe equivalent). Remember the motto "less is more", with rich desserts. We give the standard size recipe here and leave it to you how to distribute it or scale it up/down for the right portion for the right pan combination. Usually there are 4 eggs per standard recipe but by accident we only used 4 for the 50 percent scaled up batch, so maybe one less egg is okay at this batch size.