Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - 51st installment. The recipe is Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake.

Wow!  This was amazingly good, and not very difficult at all.  The family raved about it - we had it for our Valentine's Day dessert.  Talk about rich...cream cheese, sour cream, mascarpone cheese (why do we all seem to pronounce it 'marscapone'? :-)

After baking, before cooling

I followed the directions and it all went as described. I baked it in the evening, let it cool overnight, and then took it out of the pan in the morning.  I was glad I read ahead to see that it needed to cool completely and then chill completely after unmolding - it needs plenty of time for all that before serving.
It was interesting that the recipe has you bake the cake without any crust, flip over the unmolded cake, press the cookie crumbs onto the bottom, and then flip that onto the plate.  I used chocolate wafer crumbs.  The bottom was very loose because it was just crumbs, rather than a crumb crust.  We ended up liking that, and it kept it simple.  I always think of cheesecake as a big deal to bake, but this has me thinking I might make it more often in the future.   This is definitely a recipe I will make again.