Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

Hope everyone had a wonderful Easter this weekend! I spent my day with my dad's side of the family.

I offered to make the dessert and my grandparents requested a cheesecake of some variety. Even my grandpa who is not a big fan of chocolate said it was okay to have some chocolate in there. So I made a chocolate cherry cheesecake. It was a big hit and everyone was asking for seconds!

I adapted this recipe from The Ultimate Turtle Cheesecake from the Philadelphia Cream Cheese Cookbook. I did make the Turtle Cheesecake for Christmas this past year and that is a great one too. Here are my tweaks to the recipe:

Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

24 Oreo Cookies, finely crushed
6 Tbsp. butter or margarine, melted
3 pkg. Philadelphia Cream Cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. vanilla
3 eggs
1 can cherry pie filling
Chocolate syrup, to drizzle

1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
2. Mix cookie crumbs and butter; press onto bottom and two inches up sides of greased 9-inch springform pan.
3. Drizzle chocolate syrup over crust. Set aside. 
4. Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla with mixer until well blended. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing on low speed after each just until blended. Pour over crust.
5. Bake 1 hour 5 min. to 1 hour 10 min. or until center is almost set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen cake; cool before removing rim. Refrigerate four hours.
6. When ready to serve, drizzle chocolate syrup over top. Add cherries on top of each slice before serving. If desired, drizzle more chocolate on top of cherries.

This is a pretty simple and buildable cheesecake to make. I like that it's not a ton of different ingredients like some cheesecakes and it is very adaptable. You can add whatever toppings you want or can add in different ingredients to the cheesecake part.

Also, a couple notes: I added the cherries on top of the entire cheesecake before cutting into it, which is very messy... so next time I would slice the cheesecake first and then add the cherries. For the Oreo crust I used the ones with the mint filling simply because that is what we had and I was not about to buy more Oreos just to make this... but it turned out really great because my family said that it was good with the mint.

I'm looking forward to using this basic recipe again for other variations. What kind of adaptations would you like to try or see me make for another time?