Bailey's Cheesecake with Tim Tam Crust

Last week was St. Patrick's Day, and one of my housemates found all of these wonderful irish alcohol inspired recipes online. We decided to choose two and have a house baking night. The first one was a Bailey's cheesecake, which is the first cheesecake that I have ever made. Turns out, not as hard as I expected!!! Credit where credit is due we basically followed a recipe from http://www.baked-in.com, but modified it a bit. The way we modified it was that we used Tim Tams for the crust. I haven't blogged about these amazing Aussie cookies yet because I'm waiting to do a huge Tim Tam post when I've tasted every flavor, so it's coming I promise!! All you need to know is that Time Tams are the Aussie version of an Oreo, If an Oreo was twice as big, rectangular in shape, had chocolate cream filling, AND was covered in chocolate. Basically, 1 million times better than an Oreo and seriously addicting. I had the great I idea to mash up some dark chocolate Tim Tams and mix them with butter to make Tim Tam Crust. It turned out really well, and added an Australian twist to the desert. The cheesecake was really great, it tasted strongly of Bailey's (though not alcohol) and was creamy and rich. Since we used an online recipe I'm going to link it here: http://www.baked-in.com/2012/09/18/baileys-cheesecake-cupcakes/. Note that we made 3 major changes. We used Tim Tams for the crust, we didn't use cupcake wrappers, and we mixed the cake uniformly (no non-baliey's layer for us).

Thoughts on this Dessert:

• We let it sit in the fridge for an hourish, but letting it sit overnight is better because then it is super consolidated and cold.
• We were working without an electronic blender so it took us a while to make the cheesecake batter, so at home this would be quicker. 
• We greased the pan with butter because we din't have baker's joy, and you could taste it (I was not a fan of the extra butter taste) so definitely would make sure we have baker's joy next time.
• I really want to make cheesecake again now that I know how, I'm thinking taro or match cheesecake are on the list for future endeavors, as is pumpkin :)

Loved these soooooo much they were really fun and delicious!!! Check out the next post for the other St. Patty's Day dessert we made :)