Butterscotch and Brown Sugar Cheesecake

The Graham Crackers just want to be one of the cool kids.
Here's photographic evidence that they're not.

Have you ever wanted to look pure happiness and joy in the face, and then eat the crap out of it? Me too! It's an essential part of the human experience, right up there with self sabotage and cheating on our taxes. But it can be hard to achieve. According to Harry Potter, unicorn blood will turn you into some sort of vengeful garlic monster, so that leaves us with Cheesecake. And if you're already making cheesecake, you may as well make ridiculously awesome cheesecake!

Ingredients:

16 oz Cream Cheese

8 oz Sour Cream
6 oz Butterscotch Morsels (3/4 of a package)

5 oz pouch Cinnamon Graham Crackers 

1 cup, and also 1 TBSP of Brown Sugar (Why did I mention them seperately? Because they're being used in seperate parts of the recipe. Slow your roll.)

1 stick Butter 

3 Eggs

1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

The juice from 1/2 a lemon (To get this, take a lemon, cut it in half, and squeeze the crap out of it. Preferably over some sort of container. Bonus points if you remove the seeds)

So, full disclosure here, this is a dolled-up, fancy version of my mom's cheesecake. Because other cheesecakes aren't as good, so adapting them into an "original" creation would have been heathen nonsense. Now that that's out of the way, the first thing you're gonna need to do is take the Cream Cheese out of the fridge so that it can soften, and also so it can get a kick out of watching you do this next part. Because now it's time to make your crust. Oh, calm down, it won't be that bad. Take your Graham Crackers, put them in a sealable plastic bag, and smash the living hell out of them. Extra points if you preemptively channel the rage you will soon feel at other cheesecakes for wasting your goddamn time. Once your crackers are smashed into powdery nonsense, add in your tablespoon of Brown Sugar. Melt your butter, turn off the heat, and stir your cracker-sugar-powder (Which sounds like an adorable euphemism for cocaine) and mix it all up. It should look and feel kind of like that moldable sand that you wished your parents would buy you when you were 9. If you don't know what that is, get a better class of childhood. The point is, you should take your powdery sludge, put it in a pie tin, and press it down until you've got a thin layer all across the bottom, and it stretches up the sides about an inch. You can use any number of instruments to help with this, including a measuring cup, a sack of marbles, or your freaking hands already.

Now that your crust is made and your cheese is soft and amused (I'm pretty sure "Soft and Amused" will be the title of the 3rd Paul Blart movie), you've got some options. You can be a sad weakling who relies on mixers and other electronic contrivances, or you can be a man, who doesn't need any power source other than his will to conquer nature and eat some cheesecake. In either case you'll need a bowl. Add in your Cream Cheese and the rest of your Brown Sugar, and mix the hell out of it, until it's nice and smooth. Then add in your Lemon Juice, and one of your Eggs. Keep stirring, and slowly add in the other two Eggs. By now, you should either have a manly ache in your arm, or a....kind of buzzing in your ear from having listened to your mixer do all the heavy lifting for you. Take your gooey, sugary, awesomeness, and spread it out over your crust. Then throw that sucker in a 375 degree oven for 30 minutes.

For those of you paying close attention, yes, we still have more ingredients, and we aren't quite done yet. Congratulations on your alacrity. There's no cash prize, but you've built some nice character. Doesn't that feel good? While your cheesecake is cooking for those 35 minutes, whisk together your Sour Cream and Vanilla. Then melt your Butterscotch Morsels. You're gonna melt them the same way you would chocolate. For a guy with a funny accent giving simple and easy instructions on how to do that, check this out (Or, to see a slightly more convoluted instructional from a guy who looks like he probably has hitchhikers chained up in his basement, try this). Once it's good and melted, slowly whisk it into your Sour Cream mixture, in small batches. Why? Because if you dump it all in, your melted Butterscotch will harden into nonsense, and your cream will get too hot, and all your friends will laugh at you, and you'll cry. You'll lie about it later, but you'll cry. After 35 minutes, take your cake out of the oven, and spread your Butterscotch Cream mix over it. Put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes, then crank

There it is. Taunting you with its deliciousness. Smug bastard.

the heat up to 475 and let it caramelize a little on top. It should still be slightly jiggly in the middle (Mystery Link) when you take it out. Then let it cool down, stick it in the fridge, eat the entire thing in one sitting, and lie to your friends about how you accidentally dropped it on the floor!