Birthdays & Cheesecakes

Recently, I celebrated the birthdays of two VIP's: my younger sister and my boyfriend. With some help from his parents, I discovered B's favorite dessert--cheesecake. K also happens to love it, so I started searching for a recipe. After a few, terrible outcomes with past cooking adventures, I no longer trusted any old recipe found on The Food Network. Luckily, I remembered seeing a cheesecake recipe from The Daring Kitchen on B's sister's blog. The recipe, Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake, can be found here. It is a basic cheesecake recipe that can be expanded to include many, different flavor combinations. I'm not sure why the cheesecake is infamous, unless we're using The Three Amigos' definition because the recipe was delightful! Fun to make with an incredibly creamy and delectable outcome. I made a Mayan chocolate cheesecake for K and a lemon-blueberry swirl cheesecake for B. Pictures and my alterations/addends to the recipe below.

For the Mayan chocolate cheesecake, I used a cinnamon graham cracker crust and melted roughly 4 ounces of dark chocolate into the cheesecake batter. I also added several dashes of cinnamon and a touch of chili pepper (to add some heat) to the batter. Below is the baked cheesecake. I'm not sure what the dark spot is from.

After the cheesecake cooled completely and then chilled in the fridge, I added a dark chocolate ganache which also included some cinnamon and chili pepper to the top. Then, using a cheese grater I shaved little curls of chocolate all around the edges of the ganache layer. Finally, I piled the remaining chocolate in the center of the cake:

The finished, death-by-chocolate goodness:

For the lemon-blueberry swirl cheesecake, I added the zest of two lemons and a tad more lemon juice than the recipe called for (I should be more exact, huh?) to the batter. Then, I made a simple blueberry sauce on the stove which I swirled into the batter. I didn't really swirl like I wanted it to, but I have some improvement ideas for next time. This cheesecake came out of the oven with a few cracks on the top mainly around the blueberry swirl pattern. Another thing I need to improve.

I decided to top this cheesecake with lemon flavored whipped cream using the left-over cream. I then sprinkled the zest of a lemon across the cake. Finally, I served the cake topped with frozen blueberries (mmm... B's and my favorite).

This was my first time making cheesecake, ganache, and whipped cream, but I think it was fairly successful due to an awesome, user-friendly recipe. Most importantly, K and B both loved their cakes!