The Ultimate No-Bake Chocolate Cheesecake MADE 100% FROM SCRATCH!

Hi Bold Bakers! I'm Gemma Stafford and this week on Bigger Bolder Baking we are making this decadent chocolate cheesecake completely from scratch. The cream cheese, the Oreos, everything. Here's how to do it. So the first step in our cheesecake, we're gonna start from the bottom up so we're talking about crust. Now this is an Oreo cookie crust and you are about to learn how to make the most amazing Oreo cookies from scratch. I absolutely love these. Once you make them, you're never gonna buy them again. So we start this in a food processor. You can also do it by hand, food processor is much faster. So it's just regular ingredients. Some flour, little bit of sugar, baking powder, baking soda, little bit of salt. Now our secret ingredient in Oreos, Oreos have a unique, like very rich, deep chocolatey flavor and that is because of black cocoa powder. Now this is actually pretty widely available nowadays. It is ultra processed Dutch cocoa powder so it's less bitter and it has a deeper flavor. It is, when you smell it and you taste it, you're like, that's an Oreo. This is Oreo flavor right here. So in that goes. Now if you do not have that, just use regular Dutch processed cocoa powder. That's totally fine. This will give you that unique Oreo flavor. Now I'm just going to give these a little mixy mix together. Now into this we are going to add in our cold butter. Just like that. And we just want to blend this up until it resembles kind of, you know, fine breadcrumbs. Just a few seconds. There we go. I can always hear when it has kind of started to form. So there you go. Just like that. You see, we can see little lumps of butter all the way throughout. So that is great. Into this we are going to crack in our egg. Then back on with our hat and then blend it up until our dough comes together. Again, this is just going to take a few seconds. Do you hear that noise? It kind of starts to thud. That is our dough that has come together. Perfect. Look at that. Just like an Oreo. Lovely. Now the beauty of this cookie dough is that you don't have to chill it. I'm always chilling my doughs. You don't have to chill this one. We can scoop it and get it onto our trays straight away. I have some baking trays. And for this cookie we are going to scoop a leveled tablespoon of dough. Just like that. For each cookie. Put it in a little ball and then onto your tray and give it a little smush. A little smush just to flatten it. And just keep on doing that with the rest of your dough. On your baking tray, give them a little space between themselves because they will spread out. Now you might be wondering, can I just take this dough and smush it into your cheesecake pan? And, you know, I recommend doing it this way because if you do one big cookie it might be a bit chewy and hard to cut into where this will give you a lovely crumble base because we're going to blend them up later. And there is our last one. Now you might have cookie dough left over because you don't need all of the cookies for this cheesecake. So you can scoop it, freeze it, bake it off, whatever you want to do. Now I'm going to get these guys into the oven. Bake your cookies at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, 170 degrees Celsius. Fan assist. So you want a lower temperature with the fan on so the cookies cook evenly. Now they only take around 8-10 minutes to bake. So our cookies are in the oven. While that's happening let's start our cream cheese. I've got a nice big heavy bottom saucepan here. Now cream cheese is one of my most popular recipes on BiggerBolderBaking.com. We need a lot of milk. We're making a big batch of cream cheese here for this cheesecake. So what you want is full fat dairy milk to get a lot of curds out of it. So now this is really simple. All we do is turn on the heat to around a medium, medium high and just slowly let this come to a simmer. When it does we're going to then add in our acid. Now I'm going to use lemon juice and what this does is it helps curdle the cream cheese. Now you can use vinegar. I will tell you personally that I like to use lemon juice because you have less flavor from the lemon juice than you do from vinegar which can be a little bit harsh. So as you see it's come to a simmer. Now we're going to add in lemon juice a tablespoon at a time. Now the reason that we do this is because it always varies how much you need to add to make it curdle. And an interesting fact, the riper a lemon the higher the acidity. So it really depends on the lemons that you're using. Sometimes you need 3 or 4 tablespoons, sometimes you need a lot more. So as you can see it's starting to curdle there now. I'm going to stop adding lemon juice. I'm going to let it heat through a little bit. And now you can see all those curds. You see the way it's separating the curds and the way this is perfect. I have myself set over here on the countertop so follow me over and we're going to strain this. So here I have a bowl lined with a sieve and some cheesecloth. Now I have cheesecloth, not everybody has cheesecloth. So if you don't have it, feel free to use a clean kitchen towel that's not fuzzy and is quite thin. Now what we're going to do here is let this hang and strain for a little bit, let it cool down. Then we're going to go in and just squeeze out all of that liquid. So this has cooled down a little bit, here's what you want to do, bring all the corners of your cheesecloth, squeeze out any extra whey, get as much out of there as possible. Now here's the great thing about making cream cheese, you don't have to waste this. You can put this in smoothies, people put it in drinks, you also can use it in baking as a replacement for buttermilk, it also works really well, that's up to you. Now we have our lovely curds, look at that, beautiful, looks great. Into our food processor for the very last step. So we need to get this like store-bought cream cheese, gonna put a little bit of salt in there for flavor, and we are going to blend this up until it's really lovely and smooth. So now we're blending it on homemade food processors, so it can be a little bit chunky sometimes, not like store-bought, depending on your machine, so what I like to do is take a little bit away, add it in there, a tiny bit, just to loosen it up and help blend it. You can also add in a splash of milk or a splash of cream, and you can see and you can hear that it's kind of slapping around more. It's getting nice and smooth. There's something really satisfying about homemade cream cheese. You can have it sweet or savory with like just crusty bread, but look at that. Yummy. The flavor is amazing, the texture is really lovely, what I'm gonna do is put this into a bowl, let it cool down, pop it into the fridge, and the next step is let's go check on our cookies. So our cookies came out of the oven while we were doing our cream cheese, they've cooled down, they look gorgeous, I adore these cookies so much, especially with how beautiful they look with all their crinkles on top. Now we're going to make our base. So we only need 18 cookies for our base, so I'm gonna add them into my food processor. On with our lid, and then just blend them up until they're lovely and fine. So our cookies have totally crumbed, they're lovely and fine, I'm gonna add in melted butter to bring this cookie base together. Sometimes people add in granulated sugar to a cheesecake base or a pie base and I never understand that because it's just not necessary. We have sugar in our filling, you know there's sugar in the cookies, so this is just the amount that we need. Just blend it until it starts to clump, and there we have it. Now we're gonna put it into our pan. Let me show you a little trick if you haven't seen me do this already, about a cheesecake pan. 9 inch cheesecake pan, the base always comes like this, but it can be hard to lift your cheesecake because the base has a lip. So here's what we're gonna do, take out the base, flip it over, this side is lovely and flush and smooth, pop that back in there, and then just pop it in to your base again, and flatten it out. That is a trick I learned many years ago as a pastry chef. I don't know about you guys, but cookie base is one of my favorite parts about a cheesecake. Just flatten it out in the bottom there, go in with your hands, don't use a spatula, get your hands dirty. Oh my gosh, freshly baked cookies in our cheesecake base, I mean who else does this? Only us. Ok lovely, we're gonna pop this into the fridge, I'm gonna grab my cream cheese, and we're gonna make our filling for our cheesecake. So we have a lot of our components ready now, so we're gonna make the filling for our cheesecake. Into the food processor yet again, we're going to add in our cream cheese, and we're going to add in our sugar, and what we're going to do is just blend this up by itself first to get it really lovely and smooth before we add in any other ingredients. If you don't get the lumps out now, then they'll remain in the cheesecake later, if you want to get it really nice and smooth right now. Ok lovely, nice and smooth, look at that. Now into this, we are going to add in our cocoa powder, just regular cocoa powder, in there, and our melted chocolate, this is what makes this cheesecake so rich. But here's the thing, what I want you to do is melt this chocolate before you start this whole process so it has time to cool down, because you don't want it to be too hot and then your other ingredients to be cold. So pour that in there on top of your cream cheese, just like that. This is bittersweet chocolate, this is what I recommend, the darker the better. On with our hat again, and blend until combined. Our chocolate's blended in there, into this we're gonna pour in our cream, this is whipping cream so something with a high fat content, and we're also going to add in a dash of vanilla extract. Now this is a no bake cheesecake as you can see, but it's also no gelatin, so great for vegetarians and no eggs either. We don't need gelatin because the chocolate once it gets cold and sets, it will set and firm our cheesecake. Let's have a little look at our filling, I'm gonna blend this up a little bit more, and there you have it. Once you have all the components, the base is actually really fast to make. Like I said it's this lovely truffle mixture, really lovely. So here I have my cookie base, and we're gonna scoop on our filling. You can already tell just by looking at this filling, this cheesecake's gonna be awesome. I haven't even tasted it yet and I already know it's gonna be awesome. Okay, lovely. There's our filling. Flatten it out, nice and smooth with a palette knife. Just like that, lovely. Give it a little tap. Just so it settles and there's no air bubbles. That's gonna go around and just clean up that edge. So this filling is already really firm, but I'm gonna cover it, pop it into the fridge, let it set even more for a few hours, then it'll be ready to be topped and enjoyed. So it's been a few hours and our cheesecake is nice and firm, so here's what we're gonna do. Take a thin edge knife and go around the rim, press it up against the tin. Keep it nice and clean. Careful not to eat into the cheesecake too much. And there we have it. Carefully loosen this. Lovely jubbly. Oh wow. Now because we turned that tin upside down, we can just very carefully slide it, look at that, onto our platter. Now let's get this garnished and sliced. So to decorate this cheesecake, what I love to do is pipe some freshly whipped cream rosettes on top. It's a really lovely contrast of color and of flavor to the cheesecake. And then my last finishing touch is a little bit of grated chocolate on top, just to make it extra big and bold. This recipe is an all-around great one because it can work for the family or for a fancy dinner party. After all my hard work, I'm gonna cut myself a nice big slice. This is definitely for the chocolate lovers. It is rich, it is creamy, it is decadent. Bittersweet chocolate and cream cheese have a lovely tang together, I love to use those ingredients together. This is sophisticated, it's classy, it's fancy, it is definitely my type of dessert. I really hope you enjoyed this video and if you do, stick around because you can check out my lasagna and my tiramisu completely from scratch. I'll see you back here again really soon. Oh my gosh, I can't help myself, I have to have more.