Peanut Butter & Chocolate Mini-Cheesecakes

This may sound familiar, but I never cared to eat cheesecake until baking it for myself.  As a young lad, the idea that cheese and cake could taste good together was as foreign as carrots and cake tasting good together.  One of these I have accepted; as to carrots, I’m still not sold.

Cheesecake is great.  It is one of those dishes that you can proudly claim as American.  Which for some reason seems to confuse and fascinate people.  How could something so elegant, creamy, and delicious, come a country whose chief export we sometimes assume to be fast food?

When I teach French inevitably when doing food vocabulary a student will ask about cheesecake, wanting to know what fancy word the French have for it.  Cheesecake just seems to exude the qualities we associate with French or Italian; richness, refinement, decadence.  Students always seem to have a hard time accepting that really there is no good or special word for cheesecake because it really is a uniquely American dish.

Now that’s not to say in the 21^st century that could not go to Europe and find cheesecake.  I think I even remember seeing it at McDonald’s McCafé, “Real New York Cheesecake!”  But it is an obvious import; there is no tradition of cheesecake.  Shocking?  Maybe.  But the reason is simple.  The base for cheesecake is cream cheese, something that is very American and was in fact created during the 1880’s in New England.  There are a few similar-ish soft cheeses in Europe, like Ricotta; but nothing quite like our homegrown variety.

Cheesecake is easy.  Really it’s just eggs, cream cheese, sugar, pinch of salt maybe, some vanilla, and you’re done!  These Peanut Butter and Chocolate ones are maybe a little bit more complicated, but not by much!

Oreos and some butter went into the food processor to make a chocolaty crust, and then I took that basic cheesecake recipe, took out the salt since peanut butter already has some, and added in peanut butter.  The chocolate frosting, which I didn’t make nearly enough of; I forgot how much more surface area I have to frost when converting a big cheesecake to twenty little ones, is just sour cream, sugar, vanilla, and cocoa powder.

Considering it has been a while since I made cheesecake, everything turned out pretty well.  I maybe baked them a little bit long, but I couldn’t remember exactly how long I had baked my mini-cheesecakes before.  That’s what I get for not taking notes.  I also didn’t move my oven racks around in order to get the cakes in the center, which let the tops of a few get slightly extra toasty from the heat… though some of that was just the peanut butter.

Next time I do cheesecake I will hopefully be making Pumpkin Cheesecake!  I wanted to this time, but couldn’t find good canned pumpkin anywhere.  With Thanksgiving approaching that should change!