Sweet, decadent dessert food porn

The other night, I fixed something downright sinful for dessert. Figured I would share with you the making of pecan caramel cheesecake bars. Start with a cup of pecan pieces, 50 vanilla wafers, 4 8-oz. packages of cream cheese (yes, four), 1/4 cup of butter, melted, 1 cup of sour cream, 1 cup of sugar, 1 tbsp of vanilla, 3 tbsps of flour, 24 caramels, 4 eggs, 3 oz. of semi-sweet chocolate and 1 tbsp of water:

Soften the cream cheese in a large bowl:

Crush the vanilla wafters in a blender or food processor, unless you get some kinky charge out of crushing them into fine little bits by hand, in which case, hey, knock yourself out. I'm not judging, except to say that you are really fucking weird if you go that route. You should wind up with about 1-1/2 cups of fine crumbs, whatever sick twisted way you used to create them:

Take a 13-by-9 pan -- I obviously am using an aluminum pan, but you might actually own a 13-by-9 baking pan, and more power to you if you do. Mine are all either bigger or smaller, so I bought the aluminum ones. Anyway, line the damn thing with foil:

At some point before this, you should have finely chopped a half-cup of the pecans, mixed them with the wafer crumbs and stirred in the melted butter. Pour that stuff in the pan:

Smooth it out, pat it down into a crust covering the bottom of the pan, and refrigerate that bad boy:

Add the sugar to the cream cheese and beat that stuff like a rented mule until it is well-blended. Add the sour cream, flour and vanilla and mix well. Then add the eggs, one at a time while beating like a red-headed step child, except on low speed Pour the mixture over the crust:

Bake your pan of stuff at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes or until the center is almost set. Allow it to cool completely.

While that is cooling, take your caramels, add some water, put them in a bowl and microwave for about a minute until the caramels are melted:

They'll look something like this:

Melt the chocolate, too:

Pour the melted caramels over the cheesecake, then the melted chocolate. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours. If you refrigerate it for 24 hours, the caramel gets kind of liquid again and is easy to cut through. And the result is really, really good:

Bon appetit.