I have provided three crust recipes below. With the chocolate marble cheesecake you can use your choice of crust as the chocolate marble cheesecake goes well with nearly any crust, including the basic crust, a chocolate cookie crust, or a pecan nut crust. The crusts available in grocery stores work nicely, but are too small for the full recipe – unless you make two, which works well when you need to take dessert to a holiday gathering!

With any crust you prepare, start by greasing the baking pan (springform pan preferred) with butter and dust lightly with Graham cracker crumbs or your crust crumbs. Chill the dusted pan until you are ready to press in your crust. You can use this dusting as the crust if you want to avoid a heavy crust altogether.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups chocolate cookie crumbs

6 tablespoons melted butter

Stir the chocolate cookie crumbs together with melted butter until you have an even consistency. Since these were cookies to begin with, they already have sugar, so I don’t add any here. Press this mixture into the chilled pan you have already greased and dusted. I use a spoon to press the crumbs against the sides of the pan first and then in the bottom to make a uniformly thin crust. You can either pre-bake the crust for about 5 minutes at 350°F or chill it in the freezer for 10 minutes to allow it to set. If you bake the crust, you can brush it with a beaten egg white to get an even crispier crust.

1 ½ cups Graham cracker crumbs

¼ cup sugar

6 tablespoons melted butter

Preparation is just like the chocolate crust above, except you may want to stir in some sugar before adding the butter.

1 ½ cups finely chopped nuts

¼ cup sugar (optional)

6 tablespoons melted butter

Nearly any nut will work. I have used almond and pecan (separately) with great satisfaction. Preparation is just like the chocolate crust above, except you may want to stir in some sugar before adding the butter. You can blend nuts and Graham crackers for a total of 1 ½ cups if you don’t want exclusively nuts. If you want to blend nuts with the chocolate cookie crumbs, you could proportion in a tablespoon of sugar instead of the normal amount. Nut crusts should be pre-baked to enhance the flavor of the nuts.