Sunday 7 August 2011

PEANUT BUTTER CHEESECAKE


Hola amigos!

As you know I've been loving baking in Barcelona, having the time to research and experiment with my desserts and cakes has been so much fun. I love introducing my new friends here to my style of food and especially my love of all things sweet. This past weekend we had a fiesta de cenar, a dinner party at home with a variety of tapas, salads, dips, soups, home made sushi and one delicious dessert. Baked peanut butter cheesecake with chocolate honey sauce. *drools*

I was scouring my favourite foody website tastespotting for delicious sweet treats and I came across a couple cheesecake recipes with a twist. I used elements from a few different recipes to create my postre and I rate this as my all time favourite and best looking dessert yet. It was perfect in every way and I couldn't have been prouder.

Everything in this cake is bad for you, but its so easy to eat so make sure there are lots of hungry mouths otherwise you might eat it all!


Ingredients


For the base
1 cup crushed chocolate chip cookies (approximately!)
1 cup crushed vanilla cream filled wafers
55g butter, melted

For the filling
250 grams cream cheese
1/2 cup fresh cream
4 eggs
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup extra vanilla wafers (optional)

For the sauce
170g milk chocolate (your which ever you like best!)
1 tbsp honey
1/4 cup fresh cream

Crushed almonds for garnishing


Method
Pre heat the oven to 135c or 275f and prepare a spring form tin (mine was 9 inches) with a good slathering of butter all over, coating the base and sides.

Take your cookies and wafers and add to a blender to create the crumbly base. There's no problem with using your hands or smashing under a paper towel if you don't have a blender or food processor. In a bowl add the crumbs and butter and mix together with your hands. You'll see them all sticking together and you'll be able to spread this out on to the bottom of your spring form tin and create the cake base.

Now for the filling, most recipes say to use a cake mixer or you could use a hand mixer. Personally I don't have either here in Barcelona, I mixed this all by hand and my biceps are reaping the benefits of the work out.

Put the cream cheese in to a large mixing bowl and whisk for a couple minutes until smooth and creamy. To this add the eggs one at a time mixing between each one, then the cream and sugar mixing again for a couple of minutes.

Add the peanut butter, its quite hard to incorporate at first but you'll need to mix it until its dissolved in to the mixture and its all a lovely smooth consistency. Use a whisk, it helps. Now TASTE!  YUMMY?  GOOD! At this stage I decided to add a bit of texture and bite so I took some of the remaining vanilla wafers, broke these in to bite size pieces and folded them in to the mixture.

Pour this lovely filling in to the tin covering the base and smooth out the top. Pop in to the oven, on the middle shelf and cook for 1 1/2 hours on the low heat.

The cake should come out golden on the top, slightly firm to the touch and if its all good it should be starting to come away around the sides of the tin. This should be popped in to the fridge for at least 4 hours, I left mine over night.

Once your ready to eat it you can prepare the chocolate sauce. In a sauce pan heat the cream until just before boiling point, be careful it doesn't stick to the base then turn off the gas or element. Roughly chop the chocolate and add to the hot cream, cover with a lid and let it melt in to the cream for a few minutes. Mix it all together along with the honey and your done.

Spread the sauce out over the cake and sprinkle with some crushed almonds. Pistachios would be lovely as well.


And thats it, relatively simple and makes a wonderful dessert / breakfast / midnight snack.

Enjoy
x


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm.never thought of thsi but great idea whoever loves peanutbutter.All creamy:)

Anonymous said...

i m gonna try asap

nathalie said...

Oh my! That looks incredible! Definitely one to stick on the 'to make soon' list.

Unknown said...

This looks absolutely divine - and lucky you, recipe researching in Spain!

yummychooeats said...

wow that picture just literally stopped me in my tracks! Looks utterly divine!

Bex said...

Thanks! Yes very tasty. I'm enjoying making big cakes at the moment. Last night I made a dulche de leche cheesecake brownie as a birthday gift. Will post this recipes soon as well.

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