What's for Dinner: Chocolate Hazelnut Swirl Cheesecake

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Chocolate Hazelnut Swirl Cheesecake with a hazelnut crust. Yum?

I wanted to make a cheesecake that incorporated chocolate in it, but wasn't too chocolate-y [technical term]. Oh, and I wanted to add nuts in it. I remember coming across a lot of nutella cheesecakes, but because I didn't want the whole thing to be chocolate... I decided to add in swirls of it.

I LOVED the pistachio crust that I made for my cheesecake with the chocolate center filling, so I decided to use hazelnuts in the crust in today's cheesecake.

Let's start with the hazelnut crust base. For the hazelnut crust, you need:

• 1 cup of [all-purpose] flour
• 1/3 cup of [firmly-packed] brown sugar
• 1/2 cup of hazelnuts, chopped
• 5 tablespoons of [unsalted] butter, cut into tiny cubes

To make the hazelnut crust:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees [and place your oven rack in the middle of your oven if it isn't there already]. Lightly grease a  [non-stick] springform pan just to be extra careful.
2. In your food processor: add in the flour, brown sugar, and chopped hazelnuts. Pulse several times to combine those three ingredients before adding in the cubed butter. Pulse several more times until the butter is incorporated in nicely. Firmly press the crust mixture into the bottom of your springform pan.
3. Bake for about 12 minutes [in your preheated oven] [or until the edges are light brown]. Remove from oven and let the crust cool completely.
4. At this point, lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees to bake the cheesecake.

Now onto the cheesecake filling. For it, you will need:

• 2 (8 ounce) packages of cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 (14 ounce) can of sweetened condensed milk
• 3 eggs
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
• [about] 1/2 cup of Nutella [or your choice of chocolate-hazelnut spread]

For the filling:

1. In a large bowl, beat your cream cheese until it is smooth. Gradually beat in sweetened condensed milk. Add in your eggs and vanilla extract. Do not over beat the mixture, just beat it until your mixture is smooth.
2. In another bowl, separate about 1 and 1/2 cups of the cream cheese mixture. Add in the Nutella to the smaller batch and mix it.
3. On top of your [baked and completely cooled] crust, pour about half of the yellow cheesecake batter.
4. Next, pour about half of the chocolate hazelnut batter on top of the yellow batter. Repeat the layers. Originally, I planned on swirling the batter from the top to give it a marble cake look, but when I poured the final chocolate hazelnut batter on top... it looked so pretty as is that I left it as it was.
5. Place cheesecake in the center of the middle oven rack [in the preheated 300 degree oven]. Bake for about 50 minutes, or until edges are light brown and center is almost set. 
6. At this point, I turned my oven off, but left my cheesecake in the oven, with the door open for about 30 minutes so the center could completely set. At that point, I removed the cheesecake from the oven to let it cool. The hardest part.

Apparently you are supposed to let cheesecakes cool in the fridge for about 12-24 hours before you cut into it. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. Does about an hour sound okay? Because that's how long I lasted :)

Oh well, it will just be that much better tomorrow.

P.S. This post is a part of my "What's for Dinner" series, where I share what I've been cooking and my recipes. Grab and share my button:

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