especial® chocolate chip cheesecake

Once a digital camera arrived at the dr bob team kitchen, there were no limits to how many photos that could be taken to document the process of creating any particular dish. So cutting right to the chase, here are the final whole and slice photos first.

what nice (fat free!) caramel sauce garnishing, eh?
and note the elegant golden ring surrounding the just-enough layer of sour cream mixture to enhance the peek-through chip-laden golden cheesecake skin.

And the white interior has just a subtle taste of the complimentary flavor of the Kahlua Especial liqueur to set off the semisweet chocolate minibits.

Okay, so now from the start. This Christmas marked the arrival of two really big kitchen toys, the first of which was the pre-Christmas sale of the KitchenAid 5 qt mixer that 75 dollars off the 250 standard sale price finally tipped our desire scales to from the longing-look-setting to let's buy now. We did and our first use application was this triple hit cheesecake.

Notice the drbob style of kitchen prep in the background.

Notice the last paper edition of the cookbook from 2001 before CD writing became so much easier than reprinting the updated webpages on paper.

The pretopping closeup. A few cracks won't matter.

A little practice drizzle before the uncorrectable topping phase. The squeezable plastic helps propel just enough sauce out at a time in a continuous back and forth shaking motion.

Finished and under the tree.

You can see how passing to the right platter for final presentation enhances the effect by returning to the top.

Oh, the second toy... an Italian ice cream maker gift to bob from the garnishing consultant sister-in-law. So we served up the cheesecake with a little hazelnut gelato on the side, taken from Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, page 137 of the paperback edition, the hook that put the book in our shopping cart when we first spotted it in Borders. Yum.

espchck.htm: 31-dec-2003 [what, ME cook? © 1984 dr bob enterprises]