Let me share with you an excerpt from a book called “Delicious” by Ruth Reichl, that I was reading last week when I felt the urge to make this dessert and it has become one of my favourite excerpts,
“I know you are a chocolate lover. I can always tell. I am about to temper the chocolate. I have my own method; want to watch?” “could I?” inside my head, a little voice was reminding me that I had to get back to the office, but it was drowned out by the scent of chocolate, which flooded all my senses with a heady froth of cocoa and coffee, passion fruit, cinnamon and clove. I closed my eyes and for one moment I was back in Aunt Melba’s kitchen with Genie. I opened them to find Kim dancing with a molten river of chocolate. I stood hypnotized by the scent and grace of her motions, which were more beautiful than any ballet. Moving constantly, she caressed the chocolate like a lover, folding it over and over on a white slab of white marble, working it to get the texture right. She stopped to feed me a chocolate sprinkle with salt, which had the fierce flavour of the ocean, and another with the resonant intensity of toasted saffron. One chocolate tasted like rain, another of the desert. I tried tracking the flavours, pulling them apart to see how she had done it, but, like a magician, she had hidden her tricks. Each time I followed a trail, it vanished, and after a while I just gave up, and allowed the flavours to seduce me. Now the scent changed as Kim began to dip fruit into the chocolate; raspberries, blackberries, tiny strawberries, that smelled like violets. She put a chocolate and caramel covered slice of peach into my mouth and the taste of summer was so intense that I felt the room grow warmer. I lost all sense of time”.
As I was reading this, there was a small piece of kinder chocolate lying comfortably besides my Salted caramel latte and I just felt the urge to whip up a chocolate dessert and what better baking than making No-Bake desserts, effortless yet extravagant.
I think Terry Moore gave the most admirable proposition to chocolate lovers, “The 12 step chocolate program: Never be more than 12 steps away from Chocolate”. It’s honestly hard when it’s as good as a chocolate cheesecake. I believe chocolate makes anything sublime and it was once so valuable that the cocoa beans were used as a form of currency. Well, today, you won’t find that but the value of chocolate remains. Back in the Mesoamerican era, when chocolate was first discovered, I bet, they would never in their wildest imagination could have conceived the idea of someone adopting chocolate as a profession and becoming a chocolatier. The mind truly boggles at the thought of how far the Chocolate Odyssey has come, therefore, as Rick Riordon says, “Chocolate should be savored not rushed”.
I used Kinder Chocolate for the cheesecake along with cream cheese and a little mascarpone cheese. The amalgamation of these three, is truly heaven. The cheesecake is creamy and luscious, like a cloud in your mouth, ofcourse, with those occasional kinder chocolate bars that come with evey few bites. This is in simple words, Kinder Heaven.
Try it, to believe it.
Serves 6-7IngredientsFilling ~560g – Philadelphia Cream Cheese100 grams – Mascarpone Cheese1 cup – Icing Sugar300 ml – Double Cream2 cups – Kinder Chocolate Melted1 tsp – Vanilla Extract8 – Kinder Bueno Chocolate BarsBase ~300g – Digestive Biscuits150g – Butter MeltedDecoration ~1 cup- Double Cream2 – Kinder Chocolate bars to decorate (8 pieces)Chocolate Curls, Shavings or Sprinkles (optional)Chocolate Sauce or Melted Chocolate (optional)Method –
- Crush the digestive biscuits and add melted butter to it.
- Mix until it resembles wet sand.
- Roast the biscuit base on a heated fry pan for 5-6 minutes.
- Turn the heat off as soon as you start smelling the fragrance coming through.
- Lightly butter the sides of an 8 inch spring form pan and add the biscuit base to it.
- Press and Smooth it out at the bottom.
- Chill in the fridge until you are preparing your filling.
(If you don’t have a spring form pan just layer it in any rectangular dish or a trifle bowl)
- In a stand mixer or with a hand mixer, whisk together cream cheese, icing sugar and vanilla extract.
- Once smooth, add melted kinder chocolate, cream and mascarpone cream.
- Whisk only to combine. Do not over mix the cheese filling.
- Chop up the Kinder Bueno Bars roughly and fold them in the cheese filling.
- Pour the filling on the chilled base and spread it out evenly.
- Chill in the fridge for atleast 4 hours before you decorate it.
- Melt chocolate in the microwave and drizzle it on top of the chilled cheesecake.
- To decorate, whip the double cream to stif peaks.
- Add to a piping bag and make a swirls on top.
- Snap the two kinder chocolate bars into 12 pieces and place them on top of the swirls.
(However, if you don’t have a piping bag, spread a layer of whipped cream on top of the cheesecake before drizzling the melted chocolate on top)
- Garnish with chocolate curls or Shavings or Sprinkles.
- Chill another 10 minutes before serving.
Happy Foodieating ~