Chocolate-Topped Strawberry Cheesecake
Makes one deep cake in a 20cm tin
For the base:
36 Oreo cookies
2 tablespoons butter
For the filling:
2 tubs strawberry-flavoured cream cheese
2 tablespoons icing sugar
2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 cups cream, whipped until stiff OR double cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
About 20 strawberries
For the topping:
1.5 cups cream
1 tablespoon butter
275g dark chocolate
1 tablespoon icing sugar
Blitz the oreos in a blender until they are finely ground. Pour into the bottom of a twenty-centimetre cake tin.
Melt the butter and add it to the oreo rubble. Stir until combined and then press the biscuits down to make a nice, thick base.
Leave the cream cheese out of the fridge until softened (which shouldn't take long) before creaming it with sugar and flour. I ended up doing this by hand because my blender is so tiny, which was much easier than I had expected. You may want to add more sugar but I felt that my cheesecake was sweet enough as it was.
When everything is happily incorporated, crack each egg in, one at a time, beating between each addition.
Beat your single cream until thick, and fold it gently into the cheesecake mix. Add a teaspoon of vanilla, and pour on top of the oreo base.
As unintuitive as this next step is, it works: bake at 160 degrees (325 Fahrenheit) for forty-five minutes. Yes, forty-five. It will come out looking something like this.
Halve each strawberry and jigsaw them together on top to make a fresh strawberry layer.
While the cake cools, prepare a dark chocolate ganache to top:
Heat the cream and butter on the stove until it is bubbling but not quite boiling.
Break the 275g dark chocolate into shards in a heatproof container. Pour the heated cream and butter mixture over the chocolate. Stir with a fork to break up any lumps as the chocolate melts.
Add some icing sugar to taste, remembering that the cake itself is probably going to be pretty sweet. As reflected in the ingredients list, I only used an extra tablespoon of sugar.
Pour the warm ganache over the cool cake and refrigerate overnight.
Serve with... chopsticks?
