Decorated Chocolate Cheesecake

Repeated my chocolate cheesecake twice this week. One for a birthday cake and one for Easter. 

The first step is to bring all the ingredients to room temperature: 3 blocks of cream cheese, 4 eggs, 1 cup of plain Greek yogurt. 

Use heavy duty aluminum foil and DOUBLE wrap a 9" Springform pan. Be sure to come up to the top edge and fold under so it doesn't go into the pan too much. 

Spray pan with nonstick cooking spray.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

To creat the crust:

Melt 3 TB melted butter and add

20 Gluten Free Oreos - use potato masher or blender to crush

 

Push the crust mixture into the prepared pan.

Bake for 8 minutes at 350 degrees. I recommend putting the foil wrapped pan on another pan so the foil doesn't tear going in and out of the oven.

To make the cheesecake batter, mix each step separately.

First step: mix 3 - 8 oz Philadelphia ⅓ less fat cream cheese with 

1 cup sugar

Mix for 3 minutes.

Add and mix in

1 cup plain Greek Yogurt

2 tsp vanilla

Add one at a time and mix

2 eggs

2 eggs whites

Melt chocolate according to instructions, then allow to cool and mix in

10 oz Ghirardelli 60% Cacao bittersweet chocolate bars melted (or semi sweet)

3/4 TB Ghirardelli or Hershey's cacao (I forgot one time and it's fine)

Mix completely and add to the previously baked crust.

Place the wrapped pan in a large baking dish like a 10x13 glass dish and add foil stabilizers so the pan won't rock.

Boil water to add to the glass pan to make a water bath.

I add the boiled water to the pan while it's sitting in the oven.

Bake for 60 minutes at 350 degrees.

After the 60 minutes, turn off the oven with the cake inside and open the oven door for another 60 minutes. This helps the cheesecake cook evenly and not crack.

Finally. Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and oven and allow it to cool completely on a rack. 

After cooling overnight in the fridge, I decorated. I created a small circle out of parchment to create a border area and melted the 4 remaining chocolate squares. Then I used a spoon to drizzle chocolate into the border area. Because the cheesecake was cold from the refrigerator, the melted chocolate cools quickly. I wanted to add mini eggs or M&Ms to the chocolate drizzle, but some chocolate cooled so much I needed to add some chocolate to the m&ms to help it stick.

The "Happy Easter" I added with a squeeze bottle and melted white chocolate. The bunny was created on parchment and allowed to cool in the fridge for 5 minutes and another 5 with the chocolate details.