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.
