Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake

As I have mentioned before, there were 3 baby girls born on my block (even on my side of the street!) in the past 4 months - last night we had a progressive dinner with 2 of them! (and parents too :) We started out at Aaron and Allison's house for appetizers/salad (DELICIOUS crab artichoke dip, no-knead bread, and pear salad), then headed to Nate and Molly's for the main course, which was a Julia Child recipe since they just watched Julie and Julia :) There was a SLIGHT mishap when brandy was poured into a glass casserole dish that was on top of lit burners...... it resulted in this, and Nate rushing out to pick up a few more rotisserie chickens at the grocery store :) Oh well, lucky we weren't hungry since we all gorged on bread and dip earlier!

Ours was the last stop for dessert - I knew I wanted to make a cheesecake since they store well in the fridge for a day. I browsed through my Google Reader, and found this chocolate caramel cheesecake recipe on Smitten Kitchen - looked perfect, and not too difficult!

The only hard part about this recipe (as Deb notes) is caramelizing the sugar. It took WAY longer than I thought it would, probably 30 minutes. We probably weren't supposed to let it go as long as we did before adding the cream, but it all turned out ok. There were some big chunks of caramel that took awhile to dissolve into the cream but in the end, it worked and caramel sauce was made - success! I tried to make caramel once before and failed so I'm glad to know it is possible :)

So, this cheesecake was amazing. I loved it, and it appeared that everyone else did too, by the speed they ate their pieces, even while tending to babies :) I'm glad I still have half left so we can continue to enjoy it in the coming days - because there just aren't enough treats to go around at this time of year ;)

Beautiful cracks :)