1014. Zebra Cheesecake

Cheesecake has always been a revered dessert ever since I remember being fist introduced to it at eleven years old. Before that, my favorite dessert was creme caramel; I just had to have it at every restaurant outing no matter the season, although no restaurant surpassed my mother's. So the culinary creativity in variants of cheesecake appeals to me. Baked, water bath, or no-bake; sour cream, red velvet, japanese; parfaits or crowd-serving; I love them all.
Now way back in the early stages of MCW's life, I made a zebra cake. The recipe is more of a different technique for a marble cake. The same technique is used here for this cheesecake. What I loved the most is that the white batter uses white chocolate, and the brown batter uses milk chocolate; no cocoa powder here, only real, full-fat chocolate. It really does make a difference in the taste.

Ingredients:

For the base
200g digestive biscuits
75g butter, melted
For the topping
500g full-fat cream cheese
1/2 cup soured cream or full-fat natural yogurt
3/4 cup caster sugar
3 eggs, plus 3 yolks
100g white chocolate, melted
100g dark chocolate, melted

Method:

Preheat the oven to 350F. Grease the bottom of a 20cm springform tin and line with a circle of baking parchment.
To make the biscuit base, blitz the digestive biscuits in a food processor until they resemble very fine crumbs. Pour the melted butter into the crumbs and blitz again until all the biscuit crumbs are coated in butter. Press the mixture into the base of the prepared tin, pressing firmly with the back of a spoon to make sure it sticks together, then chill for at least 30 minutes.
Beat the cream cheese, soured cream or yogurt and caster sugar together until smooth, then carefully stir in the eggs and egg yolks. You don’t want to beat in too much air or your cheesecake won’t be smooth and creamy. Divide the mixture between two bowls then gradually stir the melted white chocolate into one bowl and the melted dark chocolate into the other. Don’t pour the chocolates in all at once or you will cook the eggs.
Cover the bottom and outsides of the tin with two large sheets of tin foil. Covering it with foil serves two purposes: it stops the cheesecake leaking out and stops the water from getting in. Put the foil-wrapped tin into a roasting tray that is slightly larger than the tin.
Put a spoonful of the white chocolate mixture into the centre of the base then put a spoonful of dark chocolate mixture directly in the centre of the white chocolate. It will start spreading out. Continue to alternate spoonfuls of mixtures inside each other until they are both used up. Give the tin a final shake to even out the top.
Put the roasting tin into the centre of the oven, then fill the roasting tin with boiling water until it reaches halfway up the tin. Bake for 45–50 minutes. Turn oven off and leave cheesecake for another 30 minutes with the oven door slightly ajar. Carefully lift out the cheesecake tin, unwrap it, then put it on a cooling rack to cool down. When the cheesecake is cool, put it into the fridge. Leave it overnight to firm up completely. Serve chilled.

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