It’s like a desperate message from a besieged garrison commander: “We are short on cheesecakes!” No cheesecake in the Christmas double issue of delicious.?

That’s almost sacrilege at a magazine for which, over the last 21 years, December and January have been all about the holy trinity of celebratory desserts – cheesecake, pavlova and trifle.

While 2022 has very much been the year of the mud cake, last Christmas, it was interest in cheesecakes that went a bit doolally. Cheesecake searches were up 89 percent off a huge base. Cheesecakes with a twist were even more popular; whether that was a gulab jamun cheesecake, a Turkish delight cheesecake or a cheesecake made with Nutella, Caramilk or Biscoff.

Baked cheesecakes have also finally killed off the evil gelatine-set pretenders. Ninety percent of all cheesecake searches are now for baked versions. This is in part because, during the pandemic, one baked cheesecake strode out from the pack. Searches for Burnt Basque cheesecake were up more than 2,000 percent last Christmas. This is a cheesecake that emerged from the Basque region of Northern Spain a decade ago, and has since become a worldwide phenomenon.

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I have a long history with the Burnt Basque. I first went to Donostia-San Sebastián back in the days before MasterChef, and one of my highlights was the cheesecake I had at a cafe called La Viña, which chef Santiago Rivera had created in the early 1990s when he took over the business from his family.

A year later, I was back doing a story on Basque food for this magazine. It was a magical trip, full of days drinking patxaran (local sloe gin) in the central square with disreputable Aussie comedians I’d bumped into in the street (hello Simon Palomares and Joe Avati); doughnut peaches so juicy you had to drink them before eating them; and the generous act of Rivera presenting me with his recipe for what is now more commonly known as the Burnt Basque cheesecake. (He also gave me a VHS of the making process, which gives you an idea of how long ago this was!)

The recipe ended up in my third cookbook as the La Viña Burnt But Creamy, Creamy Cheesecake, and you can tell how excited I was to finally get it into a book when I rhapsodised: “The surfaces are the glossy dark of a moonlit quarry lake in deepest night and the inside as creamy-soft as the inner upper arm of your first love”.

But it also peeved me a little that those who subsequently mirrored that recipe on websites or in magazines rarely mentioned the San Sebastián cafe that created it, simply calling it the Burnt Basque, like small-time thieves trying to rub out their fingerprints. Here I’ve tweaked my version of that old La Viña recipe by adding chocolate, so it ends up dangerously close in texture and flavour to one of those mud cakes that have been so crazy popular over the last year or so. And, as you now know, there’s nothing cooler than a twisted cheesecake recipe at this time of year… well, unless it’s a twisted La Viña cheesecake recipe!

BTW, if adding blue cheese freaks you out a little, you can dump it – but trust me, it works. It adds the saltiness that I experienced from the Spanish cream cheese Rivera originally used. So if you do drop the blue, add a good pinch of salt.

Find the recipe for the chocolate basque cheesecake pictured above, here.

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