I know I’ve been totally MIA lately!  But it’s here – the final countdown – 29 more days until I get married!!!  My dress is still being made, the food needs to get ordered still – but at least we have a place and a whole lot of liquor!!  Decorations are a whole other story however – Javier, my creative genius and husband to be has been toying with ideas of mirrors, balloons, fairy lights, tiki lamps – just about everything kind of weird for our special day.  But I put him in charge of decorations so that he would keep his mind occupied on that versus everything that I am supposed to be taking care of.  

So this week’s TWD was the seriously tempting Espresso Cheesecake Brownies – yuuum!  but wait – there is no such thing as sour cream here in Argentina.  It would have taken me 48 hours to make sour cream, so I figured that I would just have to do what any other self respecting cook in Argentina would do when faced with the dilema of cooking on a Tuesday night – make the brownies with a little extra espresso and slather on the dulce de leche!

I only use Philadelphia cream cheese to make cheesecake. Here, other brands of cream cheese are just too runny and leave the cake watery and soggy.  In Argentina, cheesecakes are often made with Ricotta cheese since it has the right consistency and the cakes can maintain their form, however, I like my cakes sweet – and the flavor comes out a little too “cheesy” for me. So Philadelphia.  It’s quite expensive here!  It’s imported, so not all stores have it – and that would mean a 1/2 hour walk in the cold and rain to the big store that will inevitably charge me way too much for a dessert that inevitably will just be eaten by myself and Javier.

I had a package of  Mendicream (a cream cheese brand here) and dulce de leche in the back of our refrigerator so I decided to put a little spin on the cheesecake part of the recipe.  I made the brownie according to the instructions (adding a little extra espresso powder to my tastes) and then baked it in the oven at around 350 F for a half hour.  I took it out and let it cool.  Then I cut the brownies into nine pieces (gave one to Javier with some mate to stop him hovering in the kitchen) and arranged the remaining 8 pieces on a plate.  I mixed up about half of a large tub of Mendicream and 3/4 of a small tub of Artesenal dulce de leche – and slapped it over the brownie.  Now the brownie was already cooled when I put the cream cheese and dulce de leche mixture on it otherwise I would have had a big runny sloppy mess on my hands.

The brownie itself came out nice, but my brownies are just so much more cocoa-ier…and gooey – the consistency wasn’t right for a brownie, but more like a cookie-cake.  Maybe I did it wrong!

But the taste isn’t bad.  My espresso cheesecake brownie turned “dulce de leche cheesecake brownie-cookie” is really rich and will be great served with mate or tea.  In fact, I’m going to share the love and bring some down to the old neighbor who runs the little hardware shop next to me.

Popularity: 2% [?]