Baking Forays

Hmmm, at around the same time Elaine was making her carrot cake, I, was trying my hand out at a CHOCOLATE cheesecake. Why a CHOCOLATE cheesecake? Well, it was at the request of my sis and also due to the fact that I didn't want to be the one eating most of whatever I made. Haha, anyway, I then decided to improvise on the normal baked cheesecake recipe by the addition of a few items. I added A LOT of Van Houten cocoa powder to the whipped cream cheese (which went well enough, the batter turned the colour of MILO) and melted a whole bar of German dark chocolate with an equal mass of cream intending to pipe concentric circles around the centre of the cake creating "walls" of chocolate rings visible when the cake was cut, kind of like the gobs of chocolate you get in a slice of marbled cheesecake. Did you know that chocolate melted with an equal mass of cream is actually LESS DENSE than cheesecake batter? Well, I didn't... Needless to say (unless we want all REALLY want to discuss the ARCHIMEDES priciple *haha*), all I got were floating rings of chocolate. Now I know why marbled cheesecake is the way it is, they actually put chocolate bits in the batter. Then I found out that I had too much melted chocolate, which I eventually used to coat digestive biscuits a la Marks and Spencer's *haha*. So, yeah, that ends the baking of a CHOCOLATE cheesecake. The chocolate coated biscuits, obviously done in a rush... The coating is pure bittersweet chocolate with cream... Haha, they look ugly... The completed cake, which doesn't look remotely like a cheesecake but more like a chocolate fudge cake... Note the "artistic" spider web design on the cake which I kind of stole from Anthony Bourdain *ah ha*... Man, it looks ugly as well... Note : *ha ha* - Wei Jian's sarcastic little "haha" which is fun to use... *ah ha* - Elaine's (I'm not actually sure if its sarcastic) little "ah ha" which is also fun to use...