My friend Bryon loves the Kahlua cream cheese pie from Marie Callender’s. So for his birthday celebration, I wanted to make something similar. But I couldn’t find the recipe for the Marie Callender’s pie online. I did, however, find this recipe for Kahlua cheesecake. So I gave it a try.
The crust:
1 1/3 cups chocolate wafer crumbs
1/4 cup softened butter
1 tablespoon sugar
I crushed up some chocolate cats from Trader Joe’s. Sorry cats…
I crushed them up in my ghetto crushing apparatus (Ziploc bag + rolling pin). The crumbs aren’t as fine as they would be in a food processor, but it sort of gives it that homemade touch, doesn’t it? OK so “homemade” here really means “amateurish”…
It makes a nice moist mixture after mixing in the butter and sugar.
I then pressed the crumbs into the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan.
Now the cheesecake:
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup Kahlua
2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream
2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
The semisweet chocolate chips, Kahlua, and butter melted together. It makes this nice shiny chocolate mixture. This is probably good all on its own…
In a bowl, I mixed together the butter, eggs, sugar, salt, sour cream, and cream cheese, and then I poured in the chocolate mixture.
Into the cake pan with the chocolate crust on the bottom.
The recipe said it would take 35 minutes at 350F, but it took about 40 minutes for mine to be set in the center. This is the first recipe I’ve seen that instructs you to leave the cheesecake in the oven with the door open for 15 minutes after turning off the heat. Not sure what exactly that does, but I did it. It still cracked a bit around the edges.
Miraculously, I managed to unmold it without damaging it too much. Usually when I unmold cheesecake, I manage to leave large chunks of it on the pan. I let this one refrigerate for a whole day before unmolding, instead of just overnight, so maybe that made the difference.
I made a sauce:
1/3 cup Kahlua
1/3 cup light corn syrup
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
I thought it’d go well with the cheesecake. I poured it into a squeeze bottle to take to my friends’ place, but tragically, the sauce was too viscous, and it was really hard to get out of the squeeze bottle once it had cooled to room temperature. I guess I should’ve poured the sauce on the cheesecake while it was still warm.
I thought the cheesecake tasted pretty good, but it didn’t taste very much like Kahlua. A quarter of a cup seems like so little compared to the rest of the ingredients, especially with strong flavors like chocolate and cream cheese. If I didn’t know there was Kahlua in it, I would’ve thought it was just a chocolate cheesecake. A dense, tasty chocolate cheesecake.