Chocolate Cheesecake

My sister's birthday came around last April 9th, and everyone thought it would be a good idea if i baked a cake for her. I've never actually baked a whole cake so i thought it would be a nice experiment too.

I absolutely love baking FYI. Its hard i think but its definitely been growing more and more to a legit hobby and interestingly it has lead me to try out cooking as well. So I've made some dishes as well for lunch and dinner.

Ok so getting back to the baking, so anyway i recently used up my RM20 book voucher at BookXcess, which has the most amazing priced books! I decided to buy a Julia Child baking book that cost  only RM 60 full price, and RM 40 after my voucher! Ever since Julie and Julia, I (and im sure many others) have been obsessed with her! I needed to get my hands on some of her recipes, and follow her lead. She's an awesome woman, just because in the time that she was baking, there were almost NO women in the culinary business, and she pushed through and was very "manly" for someone living back then and had revolutionary ideas to make it in the business. So how can anyone not love her!

But apparently all of her own books were sold out, and the closest i could come to getting one of her books was this book.

So the recipe I first tried from this amazing baking book was the Chocolate Marscapone Cheesecake. And this was an awesome recipe! I'm beginning to think that all the recipes in this book are as easy. The instructions and ingredients are made very easy for beginner bakers. Right, so here's the recipe:

This is the recipe.

This is the instructions. I think you should be able to save this
image a lot bigger than it is when you click on it.

Continuation of the above.

I modified the ingredients just a little because I'm not a HUGE fan of cheese, but my sister is. So the cheese was for her and the chocolate for me! I converted all of the pounds to grams, and only put in about 550grams of cream cheese when i think the recommended gram was about 650grams. If I were to do it again, i'd probably cut down a lil more on the cheese. The cake turned out awesome! It was more of a fudge like moist cake then a flaky cake. You have to refrigerate it, before serving because it melts a little if not. Ideally it says it keeps up to 4days, i kept it almost up to 3weeks, and was fine after eating it. Lesly was fine too, and he has the pansy stomach! But keep in the freezer if you want to keep it a while.

Baking it, I had to put the batter in a pan then put that into another bigger pan with water and then bake the whole ensemble. My mom helped me check on it, and take it out of the oven because I was late for tuition, and had to leave. When you take it out, just coat the bottom of the cake with some cookie crumbs. I had some left over chipsmore, so i crushed them and coated the bottom of the cake. Feel free to use whatever else kind off cookie crumbs you like. We didn't get a whole photo of the cake, but here's a photo of a slice. Please remember that I'm not a fan of the pretty ones, my cakes and cookies often turn out quite ugly, but taste just as awesome! =D Hah! In your face, OUTER BEAUTY!

The reason why it's not so smoothly cut is because it was advised in the book that when you cut the cake your knife had to be hot, after dipping it in hot water. But yes, I was too lazy to do that, so instead, i kept cutting the cake with remnants of the previous slice on butter knife, then scooping it up from the knife with my fingers and licking it after I'm done, it was a lot more fun and yummy that way!