CHOCOLATE CHEESECAKE BLONDIES

When I looked that this month’s We Should Cocoa challenge, organised by Chocolate Log Blog, for chocolate with cheese, it didn’t really appeal to me at first.  Chocolate cheesecake immediately sprung to mind but I’m not really a cheesecake person.  I am happy to eat one but not too thrilled by the idea of making one.

Then I saw this stuff on the shelf in the supermarket.

I’m not sure how it had passed below my radar until now but once I had tasted a spoonful I was hooked.  It’s Nutella meets cream cheese frosting in heaven.  I thought I must surely be able to do something with it for the challenge.

Then I remembered some marbled cheesecake brownies made by a colleague for our Children in Need cake stall a couple of years ago.  They were scrumptious and a best seller and luckily there was a recipe for something similar in my Philadelphia cookbook.  Hers had looked very similar to the picture in my book:

Instead of making a dark chocolate brownie mixture with blobs of ordinary Philly swirled into it, I decided to adapt the recipe to a blondie mixture with the chocolate Philly in it.

So mine looked like this.

You begin by melting butter, sugar and white chocolate together in a saucepan.  At this stage the mixture looked, I have to say, rather unpleasant.  It looked much better once I had whisked the eggs into it.

 

You pour the mixture into a square or oblong tin, blob spoonfuls of chocolate Philly mixture into it and swirl them around with the tip of a knife.

As soon as it came out of the oven, our dog shot downstairs from her bed which is on the landing. The smell of baked cake doesn’t usually excite her so much. Maybe it was the cheese that did it.

They were extremely rich and gooey.  I took them to work where they were declared a hit.  You couldn’t eat too many at one go I think, but definitely worth  baking again, and possibly for the cake stall when it comes around in November.

This is how I adapted the recipe from the book:

Ingredients

125g butter

125g white chocolate, broken into squares

200g light muscovado sugar

3 eggs

100g plain flour

¼ tsp baking powder

1 pack Philadelphia with Cadbury’s chocolate

50g caster sugar

This is what you do

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease and base line a 22.5 cm square tin.

Put the butter, muscovado sugar and chocolate into a medium sized saucepan and heat gently, stirring,  until the chocolate and butter have melted.  Take off the heat and leave to cool slightly. 

Make the cheesecake filling by mixing the Philly and caster sugar together in a bowl.

Whisk the lightly beaten eggs into the chocolate mixture.  (I transferred mine from the saucepan to a large bowl.)  Sift in the flour and baking powder and stir until combined.

Pour into the tin.  Drop blobs of cheesecake mixture onto the cake then, with the tip of a knife, swirl it around.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until it passes the clean cake tester or skewer test.  Leave to cool completely in the tin.

Makes 16 generous blondies.