The Taste Sensation

Last night Joey and I decided on a whim to make some cheesecake. Philedelphia cream cheese has this great interactive program on their site (the Kraft site) called the Cheesecake Customizer where you can choose exactly what you want to do and it will provide you with a recipe. Joey and I used the customizer and came up with an oven baked chocolate cheesecake with a white chocolate swirl.

We went to the store and got all the ingredients. We started mixing with the Kitchenaid mixer I have and I thought it was working, but it turns out, that for cheesecake, you should use an electric hand mixer if possible because it can get at the bottom of the mix and really bite through the thickness. We didn't know that there were un-mixed-in white chunks until we started pouring the mixture into the purchased chocolate graham cracker crust.

Knowing that over mixing after the egg is added creates cracks, we decided to pour the overly thick cream cheese mixture back into the bowl and remix. We tipped the crust over the pan and--whoopsie-daisy! The entire crust fell out of the pan into the bowl.

Totally unexpected.

We decided to do another mix and make the cheesecake anyway without the crust. This crustless cake is delicious! It is a Taste Sensation. It remindes me a little bit of cheesecake brownies. The edges got a little overcooked but the inside was delicious--I think this could easily be solved by cooking it less time (but that didn't occur to me at the time)

Ingredients:
1 Pre-made chocolate cookie crust (not oreos, but more like chocolate graham crackers)
1 8oz package cream cheese
1 8oz package neufchatel cheese (1/3 less fat cream cheese)
1/2 cup sour cream
2 eggs
3 squares (3oz) semi-sweet baking chocolate, melted
2 squares (2oz) white baking chocolate, melted
1 tsp. vanilla

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325° and prepare crust (take it out of the wrapper)
2. Beat cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl (I recommend a hand mixer) until well blended
3. Add the chocolate and sour cream until mixed together.
4. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat until JUST COMBINED to avoid cracks (only applicable if you are making real cheesecake and NOT the Taste Sensation)
5. Dump crust over bowl and beat once more until combined.
6. Evenly spread mixture into a 8-9 inch circle cake pan
7. Gently drop spoonfulls of white choclate over the batter and cut through batter with knife for a marble effect.
8. Bake 25 minutes (do less) until center is almost set
9. Cool completely, then chill for at least 4 hours.