A perfect Chocolate Orange Cheesecake

It's Valentine's Day and for dinner, we're headed over to these really great friends of ours who are graciously hosting a small dinner party. Tohn, our "Hostess with the Mostest" is making his secret recipe meatloaf with a red pepper gravy, B-sized red potatoes and grilled asparagus with olive oil and garlic. It sounds fantastic and out of this world.

So here I am and I opened my giant sized mouth hoping for instructions from the "Hostess" on what should I bring. "Dessert!" he said. "Bring anything you want!"

I immediately thought of some fancy place over in St Paul like "Bread and Chocolate" or "The French Meadow Bakery" in Uptown, Minneapolis. Those guys will make the most fantastic desserts you've ever tasted and they'll charge you an arm and a first born son! What can I say? I have to admit it: "Their desserts are worth an arm and at least one off-spring!"

My husband recommended cheese cake. "Don't you remember when you made me that lemon cheesecake and you made your own lemon curd? That was so good! You should make that again."

Then it hit me: "There ya go... Go for the challenge. Go for the grit. Tohn said they had invited another couple over to join us - Show 'em all how much of a Queen you really are and knock them out with a perfect cheesecake! No cracks! No explosions! Just make the "perfect cheesecake".

My husband dug out the recipe in our pantry, which was an old newspaper flyer advertising strawberries on sale at Supervalue for $.68/ quart. (I said it was old...) The title was "10 Twists on one great cheesecake." My husband cruised through it and found what he really wanted after all: "Here!! You can try this one! Chocolate Orange Cheescake!! Doesn't that sound good?!" (He's a chocolate hound... he was only goofing on "lemon curd cheesecake"... He was itching for chocolate and he got lucky with an alternative from the original.)

The trick to making a cheesecake that won't crack is based on a few conventional thoughts:

1. Eggs, cream cheese, and your cream must all be at room temperature.
2. Beat the batter until smooth. The cake will crack if the cheese isn't well incorporated.
3. Eggs will trap air in the batter so; slowly add them last and mix them slowly. Once the eggs have been incorporated - stop! Don't over mix it!
4. Bake the cheesecake in a hot boiling bath of water.
5. Surround the cheesecake with foil.
   
6. Cool the cake slowly as the temperature change causes the texture to split.

I consulted a number of sources, on the Internet and a few phone calls.

Shall we start? Let's do this, Yolanda...

A Perfect Chocolate Orange Cheesecake

3 Tbsp softened butter (divided)
8 oz Famous Chocolate Wafers
3 8 oz bricks of cream cheese
1 C sugar
2 tsps vanilla
4 tsps orange zest
1/2 C orange marmalade
1 1/2 Tbsp orange liqueur
1/4 C heavy cream
1/4 C sour cream
3 large eggs (room temp)
heavy duty aluminum foil for the pan

The Chocolate Glaze

1/2 C heavy cream
4 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 Tbsp butter

Set a pot of water on the stove and set to boil.
Set the oven for 325 F

Melt the butter in the microwave and set to grinding up the chocolate wafers. The Famous Chocolate Wafers come in a 10 oz box, so set a few on the side for nibbling. I threw my wafers in a blender and used a wooden spoon handle to make sure all of the wafers are ground to a pulp. Add the melted butter and mix until thoroughly incorporated.

(Hint: For portability, take a piece of tin foil and cut out a circle to cover the bottom of the spring-form pan. Once the cheesecake has fully cooled, you can unlock the spring-form pan and slide the bottom of the spring-form pan from underneath the tin-foil.)

Melt remaining butter and brush the sides of your spring-form pan. Pour in the cookie-crumb and melted butter into the bottom of the pan and pack everything tightly at the bottom - including the sides.

In an upright mixer, add the cream cheese and begin on the cake. Add the sugar slowly, constantly stopping by scraping down the sides. Add the vanilla, the orange zest, the liqueur and the marmalade. Add the heavy cream and the sour cream and mix thoroughly.

(Hint: Look for lumps... keep mixing until the only lumps you see are the ones from the bits of marmalade.)

Take the mixing bowl from out of the upright and with a spatula, add each egg one at a time and hand mix very slowly. Once the yellow from the yolks has disappeared, add the next egg. Once the last egg's yolk has disappeared, stop. Your batter is finished and it's time to slowly pour over the top of your cookie-crumb crust.

Take a toothpick and run it through the batter looking for any air pockets without scraping the bottom.

Baking Prep:

Take two sheets of aluminum foil and form a giant X on your counter. Carefully place your cake in the center of the foil and bring the excess foil up along the sides. In a deep 9" x 13" Pyrex dish, place your foil-lined project in the center and add the boiling water to the bottom of the entire project without overflowing.

Place the entire project on the center rack of your oven, close it up and set the oven timer at 45-minutes.

The cake is finished once you see a golden coloring appearing along the edges. It should wobble in the center and be firm along the cake's shoreline. Once it's finished, turn off the oven and leave the cake in by re-setting your oven's timer for 60 minutes. The cake will fully cool in the oven.

Twenty minutes after you've turned off your oven, begin the chocolate glaze. In a large pan, fill it 1/4 full of water and set it to boil. In a metal bowl, add the cream and the chocolate chips. Once the water is at a strong simmer, place the bowl on top of the water to form a double-boiler. Once the chips were completely melted, add the final Tablespoon of butter until full melted.

Gently pull out the Pyrex pan and spread the foil back away to add the glaze. With your mixing spoon, close to the surface of the cake, pour the chocolate glaze into the spoon and let it fall on the cake until it is completely covered. (I touched both the cake and the chocolate surface to estimate that both are just about the same temperature.) Once covered in chocolate, return it to the oven to finish cooling.

Once your one hour wait is finished and the oven is at room temperature, pull it out and set it on the stove top and place a plate on top to fully cool. After four to five hours, place the cake in the refrigerator or get ready to transport it to it's final destination.

Enjoy!

Update: This cheesecake turned out fantastic. As Tohn had said: "This is like having a slice of cheesecake that costs about $50.00!" And he's absolutely correct. This recipe gives Bread and Chocolate and the French Meadow Bakery a run for their money. I'll take my first born back with this one. With all due humility, one of the other dinner guests was stunned that I had made it. He was visibly shocked.

Here are my personal critiques:

• Most cheesecakes can are far too dry, it's a common problem and nothing to be ashamed of. It's why we make luscious toppings for the cheesecake in the first place. The topping is an excuse! However, this cheesecake was a touch too moist. Therefore, I would recommend ditching the liqueur or adding only 1 Tbsp or reducing the marmalade. There was too much of an oozing "liquidy" texture to it.
  
• Bake time listed in the newspaper flier was 45-minutes. Total bake time for me was 56 minutes. I recommend a bake-time of a full 60 minutes. Those extra few minutes would established the perfection. (Perhaps too much liquid ingredients in a ratio of too little bake-time?!)
  
• The aluminum foil lined bottom was a waste of time. Forget it. We transported the cake in the spring-form cake-pan on a dinner plate inside a Tupperware cake dome and carried along a plain white serving plate. Run a knife or a thin rubber spatula around the edge and release the spring-form pan and place the cake (with the spring-form bottom) on the serving plate and you're golden.

I took along an extra orange and my Microplane. At the time to serve, I zested half of the orange and the other half I sliced and cut into quarters. I sprinkled the zest on the top of that chocolate shell on top and made a ring of the quartered slices pointing outward.

It was truly outstanding.