Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

I've been looking through my recipe magazines trying to get ideas for Christmas since my family is coming up and it's the first tim we've hosted Christmas and I saw a recipe for Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake. I love chocolate covered cherries and chocolate chip cherry ice cream, so I figured that I would love this and it didn't call for too many ingredients. So, Wednesday after Greg got home from work, I made it. I let it sit in the fridge overnight and we had some yesterday. I thought it was really delicious, plus it was super easy to make and very inexpensive since it didn't call for many ingredients.

I also bought the ingredients to make cranberry, walnut fudge this weekend. Might as well live it up now, because after Christmas, we are going on a serious diet. :(

Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake
* 1 jar (12oz) maraschino cherries
* 2 packages (8oz each) cream cheese, softened
* ½ cup sugar
* 2 eggs
* ½ cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips
* 1 chocolate cookie crust (9 inches)
* 6 chocolate-covered cherries

1. Drain maraschino cherries, reserving 2 teaspoons juice. Cut cherries into quarters; set aside. In a small bowl, beat the cream cheese, sugar, and reserved cherry juice. Add eggs; beat just until combined. Fold in chocolate chips and reserved cherries
2. pour into crust (crust will be full) Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until center is almost set. Cool on wire rack. Serve with chocolate-covered cherries.

Makes 6 servings--according to the recipe, but those are HUGE slices, we cut ours into 8 slices and they were still very generous servings.

Didn't take a picture of the ingredients, but here's a picture of me getting it all ready.
Carter, supervising the whole operation.

I do love these vibrating seats. I was able to make the cheesecake (which didn't take long at all) and clean up and he was good the whole time.