Baked Chocolate Cheesecake—Prototype 13:
 
Back in the 1980's I aimed to get my chocolate cheesecake to taste very much like that of a certain brand that I enjoyed at the time: Alden Merrell. My efforts back then were for a healthy answer to a high-fat treat. Inasmuch as I came close, tartness was one of the taste issues that I was grappling with. My earlier prototypes included lemon juice and lemon peel, which I ended up outright eliminating in the later chocolate cheesecakes at the time.

My goals have shifted more recently, and I reasoned that tartness had an important contributing role to the cheesecake flavor, particularly when using cottage cheese, whose taste I felt was relatively mild. In light of my giving lemon juice a try in my latest combination "chocolate-and-peanut-butter" cheesecakes—with successful results—I thought that I would utilize it here in this latest chocolate-only prototype as well.

In another move to better ensure the cheese presence in the batter, the cottage cheese was boosted as well. To compensate for this, I also increased the flour.

In fact, the chocolate batter of Prototype 13 here is identical to that of Prototype 3 of Baked Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake (see below), with the only exception being the amount of flour (I used slightly more in the latter recipe, due to its deeper height in the baking process). The chocolate crust is the same for both recipes!
 
Repeat Prototype 12, but make these changes for the batter:
Boost whipped cottage cheese by 4 ounces (1/2 cup), to 20 ounces (2 1/2 cups).
Boost flour by 4 teaspoons (1/12 cup), to 1/3 cup.
Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

Bake this cheesecake for two hours (at 300 degrees, with hot water bath), then remove from oven, and allow about two hours for cooling before removing from pan. NOTE: If using a 9 1/2" pan (instead of 9"), cut this baking time to 110 minutes.

Chocolate Cheesecake—Prototype 13

The batter had a delicious cheese presence. It also had a nice tart taste, without being excessive (and I felt that the sweetness wasn't deficient either). This prototype went amazingly fast at a church event that involved only a small crowd.

This is a very popular one. I think that I have baked this particular prototype more than once using an older 9" pan in the past. I have more recently started using my newer, 9 1/2" Frieling pan on this cheesecake.
 

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