It's Raining Cheesecakes!

Wouldn't that be fun? Well, no, not really. If you read the last post, you know that I had a meeting with my son's new principal that turned into a couple of orders for me. This one was the main one. She wanted two cheesecakes for a bridal shower. She had the invitation handy, so I snapped a picture of it.



Looking closely at the invitation, you can see a pattern in the borders. It's hard to put together because the pattern goes off the edge and under the box with the writing in it, but I pieced something together that looked pretty close. I played with the cheesecake coatings a bit. The chocolate coating I was familiar with since I found an outstanding cheesecake recipe recently that had a superb chocolate ganache coating. I wanted to do a yin and yang kind of thing with them, so the problem I had was coming up with a white coating for one of the cheesecakes.

I tried making a white chocolate ganache, and it didn't work out too well. I experimented with a going away cheesecake that someone at the office asked me to make and put it on there. It ended up being more of a glaze than a ganache. Delicious, but not practical, especially for travel. The glaze wanted to run off the cheesecake as it warmed up and as you moved it. If I wasn't on top of it, it would have gone everywhere. What I ended up using was modeling chocolate.

Modeling chocolate is incredibly easy to make. It's basically melted chocolate with a touch of corn syrup added. You knead it like dough and you can mold it however you want because it is pretty firm. The chocolate cheesecake ended up with the dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate modeling chocolate accents, and the white cheesecake was covered with the white chocolate modeling chocolate and I had to make some dark chocolate modeling chocolate for the highlights on the white cheesecake. I rolled out the white chocolate and simply laid the modeling chocolate over the cheesecake. Then I had to freehand the design in the opposing color to put on top.

If you're not familiar with ganache, it's basically chocolate that is melted by pouring hot whipping cream into it. You mix it up and let it cool a bit, then you can do all sorts of things with it. In this case, I simply poured the dark chocolate ganache over the chocolate cheesecake until the top and sides were completely covered. I chill it to let the chocolate set up then put on the white chocolate accents.



And a closer view.



In addition to the cheesecakes, I made 50 of my chocolate cake balls so that there would be a variety of desserts for them and the cheesecake would last a bit longer.

I learned something interesting about the modeling chocolate. If you use it to cover a cheesecake and then seal the cheesecake in an airtight container, the moisture from the cheesecake will soften the modeling chocolate quite a bit and it will turn into more of a ganache or glaze. Good stuff.