Chocolate and peppermint... a match made in sweet heaven!

Jeff usually takes the last couple of weeks off work every year to enjoy the holiday time at home and finish up projects around the house that need to get done. This will be his last week at work this year, so I figured we should do something a little extra special for the final Weekly Wednesday Treat Day of 2007.

I gave Jeff a bunch of options ranging from cakes, cookies or different candies - one of them specially caught his eye and when I mentioned I had an idea to add a little something, he moved the rest of the recipes to the side and said we had to do these.

The first change I had to this final treat, Chocolate-Peppermint Cheesecake Candy Cane Bars, was to fuss with the crust. The original called for those "famous" chocolate wafer cookies, but we decided to add a dash of decadence with a smidge of peppermint and use those Oreo-esque Candy Cane Joe-Joe's from Trader Joe's. Yes, you use the entire cookie, filling and all - this way we didn't need to add any of the sugar as listed in the recipe. The cookies are quite sweet, so a dash of salt in the crust helps to cut that down a tad. If you prefer to just use those wafer cookies, you'll need about 35 to 40 - you may want to toss in a couple tablespoons of sugar as well.

While the crust is baking, the filling is started by melting a combination of chopped semi-sweet chocolate with an equal amount of bittersweet. I did this in a bowl over simmering water, but you could just as well melt it in a microwave at 50 to 75% power. The slick chocolate is then poured into a mixture of a couple blocks of cream cheese that had been combined with sugar, sour cream and a few eggs. To ensure a very creamy filling, make sure the cream cheese sits out at room temperature for an hour or two before using it - the eggs will also mix in much easier if they are at room temperature. If you forget, you can just submerge the whole eggs in luke-warm water for a few minutes to take the edge off.

Because there can never be too much chocolate, once the cheesecake was done, we prepared an exquisite glaze that included a healthy dose of bittersweet chocolate and another dose of sour cream. This is quite fluid when heated and spread on the warm cake, so it is easy to apply - instead of scattering crushed candy canes on top, we estimated how we were going to cut the cheesecake and placed a miniature cane in the "pretend" center of each bar.

This glaze firms up quite a bit, so the canes or crushed candy will not stick once the cheesecake has completely cooled. Because of this, when you go to divide out the cheesecake, you will want to dip your knife in a glass of hot water when you make each cut - if you don't, the top will crack and take away from that smooth finish on top. So the taste? Let's just leave it that I am too busy rolling my eyes in the back of my head, good. Dense, rich and an intense chocolate-y in-your-face flavor - I felt like I was like swimming through a chocolate pool while taking nibbles from a peppermint-laced wall when I was eating my piece. The crust has a firm peppermint bite against the creamy sumptuous filling - we did think that using half bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate in the filling added a pleasant depth to these sweet treats. You could get away with just using one or the other though. Can I send the candy cane sleigh your way so you can indulge with me?

Recipes
Chocolate-Peppermint Cheesecake Candy Cane Bars