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Saturday, October 28, 2006   More Kitchen Putterings For your enjoyment, I give you the following: Chocolate Chestnut Cheesecake For the crust: 1/2 lb of raw chestnuts 2 T butter, melted 2 T brown sugar To start, take raw chestnuts and very, very carefully cut an X into the skin. The safest way I found to do this is to hold a chestnut and stab twice, intersecting your stabbies, with a non-flimsy paring knife. Place nuts in a roasting pan, and place in a 400 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes, X sides up. They're ready when your X marks start to curl backward, opening the chestnut. Remove nuts from oven, and while hot, peel the chestnuts and discard the peel. Place peeled chestnuts back in the roasting pan and back into the oven for another 10 minutes to toast them. When chestnuts are toasted, finely chop, add butter and brown sugar. Mix, and press into the bottom of an 8 inch springform pan. Turn oven temp down to 350 degrees, and bake for 10 minutes. For the cheesecake: 3 8-ounce bricks of cream cheese 9 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted* 1 cup sugar 1 cup sour cream 1 cup heavy cream 3 T flour 1 t vanilla extract 3 eggs In a mixing bowl, beat cream cheese for a minute. Add sugar, and beat until smooth. Add sour cream and heavy cream; beat again. Add flour, vanilla, and eggs; beat until the eggs are thoroughly blended. Add chocolate and mix until combined. Pour batter over base; bake at 350 degrees for about an hour to an hour and 10 minutes. Cheesecake center will be wobbly, and surface will be cracked. Remove from oven, cool to room temperature, then put it in the fridge for about 6 hours or so. Devour. *If you take out the chocolate, this is my basic cheesecake batter. It's easy to mix up, and it's very tolerant of additons. One of my favorite things to add is a bag of white chocolate chips, melted, to this and then I top it with raspberries once cooled and chilled. Change out the crust for any sort of cookie crumb/graham cracker/chopped nut mix. Very versatile stuff. posted by jaime | 8:53 PM 0 comments

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