Baking mishap

For one of our Thanksgivings, I was assigned a dessert. It's always a challenge finding recipes and adapting recipes here to fit the ingredients that they sell. With help from the "Australian and British goods" store , I was able to find some of the necessary ingredients to begin my baking adventure.

Meagan always made a yummy marble cheesecake for special occasions. I was assigned a chocolate dessert and since Dan likes cheesecake and I had seen some Philadelphia cream cheese in the store, I thought it was a safe bet. I couldn't find any baking chocolate so just used chocolate chips. Substituted "country biscuits" for graham crackers for the crust and voila! Little did I know that it would not be the international adaptations that would get me but that it would be my good ole fashioned reading/baking skills that would be my cheesecake's downfall.

I had done everything perfectly and when I got to the end, right before I was to pop it in the oven, the directions said draw a knife through the batter to marbelize. I stared at that and read it over at least 3 times. It did not make sense to me. Why would they want me to cut a line in the batter? I didn't know but that's what the instructions said, so that is what I did. I started at one end of the pan and drew my knife straight across to the other end, leaving basically my cheesecake in two parts. My thought process was going something like this --"Hmm, this is really weird. How is it going to marbelize? what does that even mean? Maybe by separating the cake into two parts essentially, it will somehow allow for the layers to mix(I had a 2 white layers and 2 chocolate layers)." I had no idea how that  line down the middle of my cheesecake was going to work it's magic but I knew better than to question instructions.

After the cheesecake came out of the oven, Dan came over to look at it and presumably try to steal a bite. As I smacked his hand away, he asked why there was a line cut through the middle of the cake. I explained to him that I didn't really get it either but read to him what the instructions said. He started laughing hysterically and it was about that time that the lightbulb in my head clicked on. He said, " Darling, it didn't mean to draw the knife in a straight line through the middle of the cake. It meant to take the knife and swirl it around in the batter so that the layers mixed together, hence marbelizing the cheesecake."

Baking Fail.

Luckily for me, there was a layer of ganache waiting to go on it. When all was said and done, you could just see a faint line under the ganache where the cake had been cut. And hey, it was going to be cut anyways right??