=German-Italian-Chocolate Cheesecake=

Here’s how to build your German-Italian-Chocolate Cheesecake

First you lay the groundwork: The Crust.

Mix two eggs, two-thirds of a cup of softened or melted butter, and a ¼ cup of sugar. (As always you can use more sugar here but I don’t find it necessary). Cream this all together.

Then add 1.5 cups of flour and a pinch of baking powder.

Now you can add a half teaspoon of lemon zest, like I did, before my husband came into the kitchen suggesting that I make it a chocolate cheesecake. The sensible thing to do is to ask first if he wants a chocolate cheesecake. I’ll do that next time. This time, though, it was too late. As it turned out, the lemon flavor in the crust wasn’t bad at all. It actually added another dimension to the cake, but, all in all, I’ll probably leave it out next time if I’m going to make it a chocolate cheesecake.

Okay, so now work the dry ingredients into the wet until you get a sticky batter, which you then press into the bottom of a 9-inch spring pan, working it up the sides as far as feasible.

Put this aside for the time being. Preheat your oven to 350.

Next you make The Filling

Here you have some choices. I used a cup (8 ounces) of cream cheese and a cup (8 ounces) of my precious Calabro Nonfat Ricotta Cheese. I can’t recommend Calabro Nonfat Ricotta Cheese enough. I must have eaten about 9 tons of it in the last eight years. It has only 30 calories per ¼ cup. So it significantly reduces the calorie count of these cheesecake. True, maybe it doesn’t significantly reduce the calorie count when you’re talking about something that has a million calories in it to begin with, but it does reduce it, at least mathematically speaking.

That settled, it's back to the filling.

You put the two cheeses into a bowl. Add a teaspoon of flour and a cup of sugar. Add the yolks of five eggs and reserve the whites in a separate bowl. What you’re going to do with the white is beat them until they’re stiff, until they form a kind of cream with stiff peaks. This is something that I apparently didn’t do correctly. I stood there with my hand mixer for a good five minutes and didn’t manage to produce anything but a lot of bubbles. Later, I Googled “stiffening egg whites” and found I did several things wrong.

You’re supposed to start blending at a low speed and gradually work your way up. I started blending like I was at the helm of a speedboat trying to escape hitmen from a Mexican drug cartel. You’re also supposed to let the eggs reach room temperature. Mine were straight out of the fridge. The could have been penguin eggs lying in the Arctic ice they were so cold. Finally, all the sources stress that the bowl you put the egg white in has to be completely clean; any residue of anything, including the tiniest bit of yolk that makes it way into the egg, can screw up the chemical reaction necessary to make the egg whites bind. I lazily used the bowl in which I had earlier mixed up the crust, still smeared with whatever I hadn’t managed to scrape out of the bottom and into the spring form pan. Oh well, live and learn.

If you did the egg white thing right, or if you didn’t, you fold the five egg whites into the cheese mixture.

If this weren’t a chocolate cheesecake, you could add more lemon zest and even a little lemon juice. But it is a chocolate cheesecake so you don’t add the lemon zest or lemon juice.

Now here comes the complicated part. 

First you have to give up on love. Because of damage suffered in your early past, you’ve definitively concluded that you’re a magnet for abusive, domineering, belittling partners and you’re better off alone. In fact, living alone for the first time in your life, you discover you’re not only happy, but happier than you’ve ever been. Love is for other people, not for you, and that’s okay.

Once in a while you get the urge to be with someone. This urge can be satisfied through sex alone. So you begin a period of sleeping with many different random guys. It’s instructive, you learn a lot about people when they figure they’ll never see you again; you learn about their secret lives, about who they are when they aren’t pretending to be things they aren’t. You learn about what really turns even “normal” guys on. It would surprise you, I guarantee you.

It’s also dangerous, but you don’t dwell on the risks. You know that growing up in a household like yours, you developed a sixth-sense for avoiding danger. You put your trust in that.

You discover that you relate easier to others on a purely sexual basis. You are confident and in control in situations where it’s exclusively about sex. It’s a surprising turn around because you always feel so awkward and lost in ordinary social situations.

When you offer guys sex with no-strings-attached, you can have company whenever you want it. And it never overstays it’s welcome. Almost all of the guys you do it with are married; you often don’t even know their last names, and suspect that even the first names they use may be fake. That suits both of you just fine. You don’t want to marry them; after your first liaison, you don’t care if you never see them again. There’s always another one.

All the same, several guys are repeat visitors. But you’re careful to keep your distance emotionally. You keep these “relationships” casual, superficial, sexual. One guy, though, is different. You like him; even if you weren’t having sex with him, you’d like to be his friend. Love, though, never enters your mind. Love? You’re thoughts against it have hardened, become cynical, and mocking. When he hints about actually having real feelings for you, you make light of it, laugh it off, kiss him, rub up against him to let him know you appreciate his kindness, his gallantry, but that it’s not necessary for him to lie. You initiate sex to change the subject. You don’t truly believe a word of what he says and don’t believe he really believes it either. Guys often say things to keep the blowjobs coming; in your case, you want to make it clear, it isn’t necessary.

One afternoon, you’re in the kitchen, fixing him something to eat after sex. He’s trying to talk to you seriously and you’re making the usual jokes, deflecting what he’s saying. He’s had enough. He grabs you by the throat with one hand and shoves you against the wall. He’s lifted you up on tiptoes. “Take me seriously, damn you,” he says in a voice you’ve never heard come out of him before. Something in the infernal decibels, fed-up and angry. You’re pinned there in his grip, helpless, and you sense he could kill you then and there. You’re panties are soaking wet. You’ve never been so turned on in your whole life. You don’t realize it then but this is a moment you’ll never forget: the moment you fell in love with him.

You’ll come to understand that the reason why it was so hard for you to recognize love when it came was that you had never been in love before. You were always looking for something else. What you had called love up to now, what you recognized as love,  wasn’t love at all; it was a toxic dependence on a personality type reminiscent of the primal abusers of your past.

There will be several years still to come. Years when you will become more than weekly sex partners, but lovers in every sense of the word. You’ll date. You’ll travel. You’ll live together. You’ll experience things you never could have dreamed in your wildest fantasies that you’d ever experience. He'll never be anything but kind and considerate and caring. He'll appreciate things about you that no one ever appreciated before, that no one even bothered to notice. He’ll tell you one day you’re going to get married. You won’t believe him, even though every thing else he’s ever told you, no matter how improbable, has come true. Then, one day, you’re standing before a minister trembling, crying softly, hardly able to read the vows you wrote him, saying “I do.”

Now he comes strolling into the kitchen, this man you’d give anything…you’re life, if necessary, because he gave you a life and love that without him you would have never known existed. There’s nothing he could ever do to you from here on out, including kill you, and you mean this literally, he could take you by the hand one afternoon and bring you in the cellar and sit you on a chair and say “this is it, this is where it ends” and shoot you through the head and that wouldn’t change your basic feeling of gratitude towards him, it wouldn’t change the fact that you love him. This is a fact that you don’t really want him to know but feel the need to express somewhere, if just once, so you bury it here in the middle of a chocolate cheesecake recipe where it is unlikely he or anyone will ever read it. This is the man who comes into the kitchen now at exactly the right moment and asks, “Can I grate the chocolate for you?”

I guess there are other less complicated and less dangerous ways to grate a cup of chocolate but this is how I did it. Use the chocolate of your choice. My husband used a bar of Croatian chocolate he bought at the Croatian butcher shop. He grated it up very fine using a cheese grater. We kissed and he returned to the living room to watch TV.

At this point, you’re nearly done. You fold the finely grated chocolate into the cheese mixture. Then pour the cheese-chocolate mixture into the spring pan. If you like, top with sliced almonds and dust with cinnamon.

Next you need a baking sheet or pan. Something with raised edges. You line it with tinfoil and set your spring pan in the center. Then you pour about a half-inch of water into the pan. This is supposed to help keep the bottom of the cheese cake from burning and the sides from sticking.

Slide the cheesecake into the oven and let bake for about one hour.

The cheesecake will need a couple of hours to cool. So if you haven’t started this early in the day, you better have something else on hand for dessert. Better still, let the cheesecake cool in the fridge overnight. Remove the springform when the cheesecake has thoroughly cooled—or, the very least, significantly cooled.

I’ve made a number of cheesecakes in the past and they’ve all been so-so to pretty good, but nothing really special. This one is far and wide the best I’ve ever made; it's really special! It tastes like it was made by someone else who really knew what they were doing, not by me at all! I’ll definitely be using this recipe again.