Are you driving to the path of totality for the pure experience, or are you super-lucky enough to live there, or are you just going to see what you can see at home? (Or, for all my lovely non-US readers, are you looking forward to Tuesday when our collective freakout might start to calm down?)
I’ve finally settled on just staying home and enjoying what I can see from our own roof. I’ll take the 97% view we’ll get here and be thankful not to deal with traffic. Plus, staying home means we have the best excuse to dig into super-rich, decadent, total-eclipse-inspired blackout cheesecake.
Confession: I love cheesecake so much that I almost never make it because I have zero self-control. And dark chocolate cheesecake! Ugh, literally irresistible to me. I made sure to tell all the neighbors that we have this, because I’m gonna need help not to stuff every last crumb in my face.
But… my beautiful cheesecake cracked. I was so pleased when I pulled it out of the cooled oven and the top was perfectly smooth, but there it was when I opened the fridge in the morning: a long, deep moon crater.
Perfectionist-me wanted to throw a fit and ditch it and start all over because it was going to ruin my pictures. Realist-me remembered that 1. this was already a two-day labor of love that was going to taste delicious anyway and 2. the eclipse is in three days so I better hurry up & share it with you and 3. I didn’t need one cheesecake in the house and I definitely can’t handle two. (Science-me just wants an oven that can maintain temp, but that’s a whole other thing.) I really gotta listen to realist-me more often, she makes some great points.
So here it is: creamy, melt-in-your-mouth, cracked-top blackout cheesecake. Food52 has some good tips to avoid cracks, and I want to high five every single one of you whose cheesecakes turn out perfectly, but for the rest of us? It’s okay. We’ve still got sweet, sweet cheesecake.
Eclipse Blackout Cheesecake
Ingredients
- 30 chocolate wafer cookies
- 6 T. butter melted
- 10 oz. 80% dark chocolate
- 24 oz. cream cheese softened
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 4 eggs
- 1/3 cup sour cream
- 2 T. flour
- 1 T. vanilla
- black food coloring (optional)
- 4 oz. white chocolate melted
- 1 t. coconut oil
- 6 drops yellow food coloring
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325°F. Fill a large baking pan halfway with water and set on the bottom rack.
- Pulse chocolate cookies in a food processor until ground into small crumbs. Drizzle in butter and pulse until mixed through. Press cookie mixture into the bottom and halfway up the sides of a buttered 9-inch springform pan.
- Warm the dark chocolate in the microwave for 5 seconds, then use a vegetable peeler to scrape chocolate curls until you have about 2 tablespoons worth. Set chocolate curls aside in the fridge and melt remaining chocolate.
- Beat cream cheese and sugar together in a stand mixer. Add eggs one at a time, then beat in sour cream, flour, and vanilla. Mix only until smooth and avoid overbeating.
- Stirring constantly on low, pour in melted dark chocolate. If using food coloring, add five drops at a time until the filling reaches the shade you want. Pour filling into the cookie crust.
- Bake at 325°F for 1 hour, until the edges are set but the center is still slightly jiggly.
- Turn off the oven, crack open the door, and let the cheesecake cool in the oven for another hour.
- Remove the cheesecake from the oven and run a knife around the edge. Let set in the refrigerator at least 4 hours, ideally overnight.
- Carefully remove the sides of the springform pan. Mix together melted white chocolate, coconut oil, and yellow food coloring, then drizzle around the very edge of the cheesecake, letting it drip down the sides. Press chocolate curls around the top edge before the white chocolate sets.
Print Recipe
Did you know that calories don’t count during a total eclipse? True story.
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