Yesterday I spent a solid 4 hours “baking” for my husband.  I wanted to make a chocolate cheesecake for Jeff and I.  I have successfully (by no means perfectly) made cheesecakes in the past but never chocolate.  I found a recipe online that looked fairly easy.  The recipe started with crush 20 oreos.  First I pondered 20 how did they decide on 20…. not 21 not 19, 20 oreos.  Secondly do I leave the filling in or out?  I spent the next half hour scraping the filling out (all while wondering what processed to make a cheesecake when the store is just down the road).  Once my oreos were crushed I mixed them with butter to make the crust.  Well turns out when they said crush to dust they were not kidding.  I squished the crust in best I could and popped it in the oven.
The next step was supposed to be done in the 8 minutes while the crust was cooking (maybe wonderwoman could in 8 minutes…. me well an hour later).  I was supposed to mix my cream cheese with powdered sugar which I thought was weird but hey, what do I know.  My cheese and sugar mixed I added the cocoa powder.  Next it said to add my eggs one at a time as not to overheat them.  They made this sound very dramatic overeaten eggs!  I should mention while I am doing all this I am supposed to be melting chocolate in the microwave.  I was short a little baking chelate so I added chocolate chips (apparently thats not a good idea).  The batter of cheese, sugar, cocoa and eggs had mixed.  This is when for the second time I thought what on earth was I thinking.  My batter was lumpy… I called my mom her response was “Maybe the cheese was not room temperature?”.  I explained I took the cheese out at 8am and it was no about 2pm.  It was at this point that I opened the microwave (I had been heating the chocolate 30 seconds at a time) to be greeted by burnt smelling asphalt.  I called my Grandma and asked if it was possible to burn chocolate.   We decided to discard the sketchy melted chocolate and use the instructions on the cocoa powder to make baking chocolate (adding  1/2 cup of oil and lots of cocoa powder).  Now I was supposed to “Pour” the batter into the pan and spread flat.  I tipped the bowl over to pour… nothing happened.  I scraped my batter into the pan and beat it down into the pan.  It was at this point I thought “Just throw it out and clean up the evidence no one but you will know”.  I decided after all this work just to see what happened.  I put my pan of unknown substance into the oven for an hour.  When I took the pan out my “Batter” had risen like a cake.  I walked into the kitchen 10 mixtures later to find my mystery object had changed its mind after all and had fallen to a cheesecake like level.  I put this thing in the fridge to wait until after dinner.
My husband is a truly wonderfull man, he is patient and kind.  He bit into the cheesecake and said “The texture is good”.  Next he said “I get that faint burnt taste of chocolate”.  I reminded him that I didn’t use the burnt chocolate and if it tasted burnt I just plain burned it.  His next statement was a very enthusiastically “I’ll still eat it”.  Which he did, he ate his whole piece.  I took one bite and pronounced it inedible and threw the whole thing out.  Jeff kindly reminded me he would have eaten it and I told him it taste like burnt dirt and he should have higher standards!