Birthday baking

So my birthday was last Saturday (I had a great time, received lots of nice presents and will need another lifetime to get through all the novels I received) and as always I made the cakes myself. To be on the safe side, I decided to make 3 cakes. I made a the carrot cake, which is my favourite cake, an apple pie, which turned out to be everybody else's favourite, and an American chocolate ripple cheesecake. This last cake is a bit like the double chocolate cheesecake I made a while back, but then with Mary Berry's twist. Here's how I made it:

Ingredients:
200 g crumbly biscuits (can be choclate digestive, if you want to be really festive)
100 g butter
200g cream cheese
400g mascarpone
100 g sugar
2 eggs
200g milk chocolate , melted


Line the bottom of the spring form tin with baking paper.
Mix the crumbled biscuits with the melted butter. Press the biscuit mixture into the base of the tin. Leave to cool in the oven.
Preheat your oven to 180C.
Mix the cream cheese with the mascarpone until it becomes soft. Add the sugar and keep mixing. Add the eggs, one at a time.
Spoon half of the mixture on top of your crumbly base. Then fold the melted chocolate into the other half of the cream cheese mixture and stir well.
Spoon the chocolaty half of the mixture on top of the other cream cheese, and "stir with a knif to create a marbled effect". If the bit in quotes does not work for you, you're in good company. It never works for me, nor did it this time: I just had a two-layered cheesecake, yellow on the bottom and chocolate on top.
Level the top and bake in the oven for about 1 hour. Towards the end, the cream cheese will be fluffy and puffy and rising over the top of your baking tin like a souffle.
When done, leave to cool in the oven with door closed. The cake will shrink back on itself to about the same level as before it went into the oven.

This can be a tricky one to get out of the tin, so I cooled it in the fridge over night to make the bottom and sides become more solid, and then I managed to get it out whole.

Now this proved to be the least popular cake last Saturday, but that may also be because I baked the apple pie on the day itself, and carrot cake is just always immensely popular. Anyway, that leaves more for me, so I'll just go downstairs and have another slice.