Raw Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache Recipe

Raw Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache Recipe

It is very easy to create metaphors between love and food. Food is divine – an appetizing allegory for love – which is definitely and infinitely delectable. Both are visceral, encompassing and intellectually impossible to reduce down to the sum of their parts. It is all sensory – visual, tactile…gustatory.

And of course, there is nothing sweeter than when love is new! Optimistic, longing, so exciting that there is almost a very physical manifestation of anticipation and desire – you glow, you become animated, more attractive, almost a magnetic force. And then as a relationship develops…becomes more open, there is a gorgeous blooming and lingering…and savoring,  in slow motion…. colors become saturated as what you have been anticipating is realized. Life is good. And suddenly new.

**Sigh**

I wanted to make something that paid homage to this love coming to fore.

I think that nothing less than a most decadent dessert will suffice! And while dessert typically ends a meal, this one was inspired by a beginning.

This was all kindled late one night as I was sitting in my kitchen, alone with my cup of tea, daydreaming. Remembering a beginning. And all the excitement and Technicolor dreams that go with it – so I let the daydream wander into freespace and of course, the way that I am, it eventually culminates in…food. I wanted to replicate the waves of emotion that new love brings – the excitement, anticipation, openness, richness. With an element of surprise and unexpectedness. I imagined a marriage of sweet and tart, liquid, luscious, creamy, interrupted only by not-quite-salty punctuations of a crumbly crust and finished – naturally, as if there was a choice – with the unabashed velvet that is chocolate ganache. The beginning of love deserves no less commemoration!

With this much inspiration, I had no choice but to work (late hour be damned), like a woman possessed, to realize this figment of taste in my imagination. In a veritable fugue, I feverishly gather ingredients that I have faith will all come together to make this hyperbolic confection.

Now you have to remember that while I have an uncompromised goal in mind, I work within a modernist design construct of form+function. What does this mean? Well, in a nutshell, that which causes a wanton sensory reaction must also be….healthy. Sounds anti-climactic but think of it in the health as bondage realm. And don’t get me started on raw! Not so anticlimactic now! (wink).

And I laugh, because, really, the best relationships are, well, healthy. Touche. Cliché.

That is where the element of surprise comes in – all this richness and decadence comes not from the common cream but from the coupling of cashews and coconut.

So here are two versions of what I call the Velvet Underground: Raw Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache. One of them made rosy with raspberries. Because it is, after all, about red hot love.

Take a bite, close your eyes and remember that time. When it all started.

Raw Cheesecake with Chocolate Ganache Recipe

Part 1 – The Crust

Part 2 – The Filling

Part 3 – The Ganache