34 Weeks of Clean - Recipes - Chocolate Lace Cheesecake

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I'm participating in a weekly challenge and link-up at Family, Faith, and Fridays. Our assignment this past week was to go through our recipes and organize them. And a bonus assignment: share one of the recipes we found as we were organizing.

I have too many cookbooks, I think. Especially when you consider the fact that I don't particularly like to cook. A couple of years ago I reduced my cookbook collection quite a bit, but this week I found a few more cookbooks that were just not getting used so they are going away too. What was worth keeping? My collection of Company's Coming cookbooks. Most of those get used often and I have several go-to recipes in each of them. They are practical and the instructions are clear, which is good for this kitchen-challenged gal. I also kept a couple of church cookbooks and my Cooking with Coca-Cola book. The Barbecue Bible is my hubby's. I kept my Mennonite Treasury cookbook - my all-time favorite! - and two others that had been my Grandma's. The very beat-up book on its side - The Complete Cook - was part of a Christmas gift from my Grandma when I was a newlywed. I refer to it as my 'cookbook for dummies' because it's exactly that kind of book, from before the "For Dummies" series came out! It doesn't assume that the reader knows anything about cooking, so it explains a lot of basics and how to do things from scratch. It is thanks to that cookbook that I have any idea how to make a white sauce or roast a turkey. Not kidding.

So my pared-down cookbook collection is now on the upper two shelves of this small bookshelf I have in the dining room. After I cleared it out, I wound up with the bottom shelf empty, so now I am figuring out how to make the best use of it.

Do you like print recipes off from websites or rip them out of magazines "to try later" and then have a mess? Yeah. Me too.  I have that white three-ring notebook that is supposed to hold all those kinds of recipes, but it had been a long time since I actually hole-punched those pages and put them in there in any kind of order. It was getting tiresome to sort through a stack of paper every time I was looking for that one soup recipe that I thought I printed... but now I can't even remember where I found it, so I hope it's in this stack somewhere... grrrrr..... You know. Or maybe you're better at organizing and you don't. So I sorted those out and got it in order too. (And made that soup recipe for lunch today, by the way. It was very good. I got it from Brittney at Mom's Heart, if you'd like to try it too - Spinach and Tortellini Soup)

Now, we were also invited to share a recipe that we rediscovered while getting organized. We actually unearthed this recipe a few weeks back, but I was so excited because I thought I'd lost this little recipe book forever. It's a little Pillsbury magazine type cookbook with chocolate recipes in it, and it had our all-time favorite Chocolate Lace Cheesecake recipe in it. The cheesecake that I have made for my hubby's birthday every year for probably 20 years - except this past year because I couldn't find the recipe! I think I will make it for Valentine's Day instead.

Chocolate Lace Cheesecake

Crust:

2 cups chocolate wafer crumbs

1/4 cup melted butter

Filling:

2 (8 oz) packages cream cheese, softened

2/3 cup sugar

3 eggs

2 cups (or a 12 oz package) semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled slightly

1 cup heavy whipping cream

2 tbsp melted butter

1 tsp vanilla

Topping:

1 cup dairy sour cream

1-1/2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp sugar

1/2 oz melted unsweetened chocolate

Heat oven to 325* and butter a 9-inch springform pan. Blend the crust ingredients and press into bottom and up sides of the pan; refrigerate. In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Mix in melted chocolate chips. Add whipping cream, melted butter and vanilla; beat until smooth. Pour into crust and bake for 55-65 minutes, until edges are set. (Center of the cheesecake will still be soft. To minimize cracking while baking, also set a shallow pan half full of water on the lower oven rack.) Cool in pan 5 minutes before removing sides. 

In a small bowl, stir sour cream, vanilla, and sugar until smooth. Spread over completely cooled cheesecake. Drizzle with the melted unsweetened chocolate in a lace pattern. Refrigerate several hours or overnight before serving. 

For Week 6, we will be cleaning and scrubbing once again! The oven, stove, counter tops, and whatever we might have missed so far in the kitchen will get cleaned this week. For the details of the assignment, go to Family, Faith, and Fridays. Join in if you haven't already, and check back next week for our progress!

As for me, you guessed it! Time for a coffee break!

Almost forgot... This post will be linked at Try a New Recipe Tuesday, hosted by Lisa at Home to 4 Kiddos

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