Chocolate Shot Cheesecake

Recipe from Bob Burns, Truck Company No. 3



picture of chocolate shot cheesecake

This is on page 161 of San Francisco Firehouse Favorites by Tony Calvello, Bruce Harlow, Georgia Sackett, and Shirley Sarvis, published 1965 by Bonanza Books — a locally famous, long out-of-print cookbook put together by SFFD firefighters blessed with gastronomic sophistication.

SFFD tradition held that, because of a gruelling schedule of a 24-hour watch, from 8 a.m. to 8 a.m., then get two days off, repeating this pattern for 16 days (then a longer break), "every day is a Friday and every meal is a banquet".

Yields:

10 servings

Time Required:

Ingredients & Preparation:

Crumb Crust:

Mix together thoroughly crumbs, sugar, cinnamon, and melted butter, and press over bottom and sides of a buttered 9" (23 cm) spring form pan. Bake in a slow oven (300°F, 150°C) for 5 mins.; cool.

Cheese Filling:

In a large mixing bowl, beat cheese until fluffy. Add sugar, lemon peel and juice, and vanilla extract; beat thoroughly. Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry, and fold in. Turn into crumb crust. Bake in a slow oven (300°F, 150°C) for 55 mins., or until golden and set.

Topping:

Mix together sour cream, sugar, and vanilla extract. Spread over top of hot cake. Return cake to slow oven (300°F, 150°C), and bake 10 mins. more. Cool thoroughly. Sprinkle top with chocolate shot. Remove sides from pan. Makes 10 servings.

Cook's Notes:

Bob Burns credited the original recipe to his wife, and says the original called for half a cube of butter for the wife, but he prefers to use the whole thing. Likewise, his wife's version said to bake for 45 mins., but he recommends baking until brown on top, which might even take an hour, and that it should be "nice and stiff".


1 Cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

2 "Graham cracker" is an American term meaning a sweet baked item made using Graham flour, a particular coarse-grained whole-wheat (UK: wholemeal) flour, named for a 19th C. food faddist, Rev. Sylvester Graham, who promoted its use for alleged health benefits. Outside the USA, the closest substitute would be digestive biscuits, which are similar but with higher fat content. (My thanks to Max Hauser of Mountain View, CA, for reminding me of this Americanism and its best equivalent elsewhere.)

3 Your cooking will be improved by acquiring a spice grinder, and thereafter buying/storing only whole spices, grinding only as/when needed. Ground spices go flavourless quickly, even in tightly sealed jars.

4 After a lifetime of not knowing one cinnamon from another, I learned that true cinnamon comes only from the inner bark of the "Cinnamonum verum" tree native to Sri Lanka, and has milder, more interesting, citrusy flavour compared to bulk, grocery-store cinnamon, which is made from cheaper, harsher-tasting non-verum Cinnamonum species grown largely in southern China, Vietnam, and India, and which technically isn't cinnamon at all, but rather is properly called cassia.

5 The term "chocolate shot" seems to have dropped out of usage, since 1965. Personally, I infer from a different old recipe that it means chocolate sprinkles. My friend AJ suggests it might refer (instead) to a product like Rainbowland Candy Co.'s chocolate-flavoured liquid candy in syringe packaging (suitable for writing, or making a figure atop the cake). Either sounds plausible; be creative!

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/chocolate-shot-cheesecake.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Apr. 26, 2024. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

Taken from: https://archive.org/details/sanfranciscofire0000unse_d3s5. (That book's copyright notice is toothless as to the recipes themselves, having force concerning only non-recipe elements such as photos.)

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2024 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)

Image (used, here, unmodified) is Copyright © 2021 by my friend Evan Prodromou, who licensed it for use under CC-BY-SA-4.0 International. My thanks for Evan's generosity. (Evan's photo is specifically of "a slice of New York cheesecake with blueberry topping", which seems close enough.)