Oh, I don’t know… I’ve seen the effects of too much cheesecake. But it’s such a happy agony, it’s true.

Artcargirl–this cheesecake has a similar effect to the orgasm cookies– “Cakes of Aphrodite”–but as Zak says, you can only eat one small piece of this cheesecake at a time, whereas he has a nearly infinite capacity for eating the cookies. (Dan begs to differ–he is the only person I know who can eat more than one small piece of my cheesecakes. It is sort of a contest between us now–can I possibly make a cheesecake that will stop Dan, while he refuses to admit defeat at the hands of even the richest cheesecake.)

Maureen, gingersnaps should work fine, though they take the cake away from the Black Forest meme–I used the chocolate wafer cookies to stand in for the chocolate cake layers in the original. But hey–it does sound like it would taste good, so go for it!

Bread and Roses–for the swirl inside the batter, I suggest that you basically cook your home-canned sour cherries–which I am certain taste delicious–into a preserve. There are recipes for cherry preserves online and in cookbooks, but basically, you cook them down with sugar, a bit of lemon juice and sometimes pectin. What this does is it pulls most of the juice out of the fruit and it combines with the sugar and sometimes the pectin, to form a gel, which, when baked inside your cheesecake will not add extra liquid to the batter, thus messing up the texture of the baked cake. (You don’t want sticky spots or goopy bits in your cheesecake–you want it to be uniformly creamy and velvety.)

For the topping, you can go with the cherries as is, and just cook the topping longer to get the juice to jell–the preserves in the topping are basically there to help thicken the mixture a bit.

So my friends have not made sour cherry preserves but they do wonderful home -canned sour pie cherries. Do you think I could substitute those? should i reduce the juice or something.