Cheese Cake Duane's

By howellja

Ingredients

• Crust For chocolate crust
• 1 1/2 c crushed nilla wafers 1 1/2 c crushed nilla wafers
• 1/4 c sugar 1/2 c sugar
• 4 TBSP real butter 5 TBSP real butter
• 1/3 c Hershey’s cocoa
• Cheesecake
• 3 – 8oz pkgs cream cheese
• 1 – 14oz can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
• 4 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 – 12oz pkg vanilla (white) chips melted

Preparation

Step 1

With mixer, beat cream cheese until light and fluffy. Add sweetened condensed milk and vanilla, mix until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each egg. This is to add air to the batter. Add melted vanilla chips to batter and mix on high for 3-4 min.
Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees. Prepare crust and press into 9” spring form pan, going up the sides 1/2” from the top. Pour batter into crust. Place spring form pan on cookie sheet to bake.
This next part is very critical and will take some experimentation. Bake 40 to 50 minutes. This will vary as every oven is different. Bake until just around the edges starts to look “dry”. The center 3”-4” will still be soft (liquid). This cake can be over baked by as little as 2 minutes. If you over bake this it will crack down the middle like a dried mud bed and you will know that you over baked it. Now comes the trick to making this cheesecake. Turn the oven off, leave the door closed with the cake inside and go to bed. Come back in the morning, take it out and refrigerate.
When cooled, run a thin knife around the edge between the crust and the pan. Release the latch and slide up off the cake. Gently slide the cake off the base of the pan onto a flat platter. Use a warm knife (run it under hot water) to cut. You will have to clean and reheat the knife after each cut.
There are several variations that I like to use with this base recipe;
You can add a bag of Bots-o-brickle English toffee to it and drizzle with chocolate sauce after cutting.
Pour half the batter in and add seedless raspberry jam, pour the rest of the batter in on top and marble with a knife. You can also use caramel.
My favorite variation is to bake up a batch of your favorite fudge brownies ahead of time, cut the brownies into about 1” squares, roll the brownie pieces in either chocolate sauce or caramel. Pour half the batter in, place the coated brownie pieces into the batter, pour the rest of the batter in on top and then add a few more coated brownie pieces on top for decoration.
You can use the chocolate crust mix and substitute chocolate chips for the vanilla ones. For some reason the chocolate doesn’t take as long to bake so you will want to back your time off by about 10 minutes. This comes out like a truffle cheesecake.
I have also taken and cut snickers candy bars into about ¼ in slices and pressed them down into the batter.
My brother loves pinna cola flavor. Once I added ¾ c shredded coconut to the cruse. I added a can of (drained) crushed pineapple to the batter. I also substituted coconut extract instead of the vanilla extract.
Feel free to try your own variations and let me know how it turned out.
This is a recipe of my own creation, mixing and matching at least 3 different recipes. It took a lot of experimentation and trial and error to get it right. I used my co-workers as guinea pig. I was a welder at the time and had weld curtains hanging around my work area. I had told several co-workers that I had some cheesecake in my area and to go and help themselves. I made the rounds and let a few more know and returned to my work area to see several pairs of legs behind the weld curtain. As I approached my area I could hear some strange sounds coming from behind the curtain. Sounds I should NOT be hearing at work. Mmmmmmm, Ooooooh my god, Ooooooooo, Oh it’s soooooooooooo good.
I knew I had the recipe right, and it had a name.
Enjoy.
Duane