Daring Bakers April Challenge: Cheese and Wine Course

Leave it to me to turn dessert into a dinner course- the well know cheese and wine course :-) The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

Daring bakers returned to the sweet side this month and gave us the opportunity to get our creative juices flowing. We were provided with a basic plain cheesecake recipe and given the liberty to add, subtract, and change the recipe to create some unique flavors.

I asked a friend her favorite kind of cheesecake and she said Vanilla Bean. I was thinking, great what a boring choice. Ho-hum, boring, run-of-the-mill vanilla. But, I did have some vanilla beans I wanted to use up. Then I thought… Let’s increase the alcohol content in the cheesecake. Lastly, I had to do a little more tinkering with the basic Vanilla Bean Cheesecake and added a caramel sauce, an alcohol based caramel sauce. Hehehe… I can hear the gasp.

So, I present to you...

Kahlua French Vanilla Bean Cheesecake with a Kahlua French Vanilla Caramel Sauce...

I am getting really busy with graduation in less than 20 days from the date of this post. So, below I am including the ingredients without instructions. I am pretty sure you can figure out how to put them together on your own, :-)

Cheesecake Ingredients

Crust:
- 2 cups Leibniz Butterkeks (German Cookie in Yellow package with Red writing- I bought mine from Wal-Mart)
- 1 stick butter
- 1 ½ tbs sugar

Filling:
- 2 sticks cream cheese
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2/3 liquid- (at least 1/3 cup heavy cream and the rest Kahlua French Vanilla)
- 2 tbs Kahlua French Vanilla
- 2 vanilla bean innards
Caramel Sauce:
- 2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 tbs light corn syrup
- heavy cream and Kahlua French Vanilla
- 4 tbs butter