Who Ate All the Mascarpone?

Ever getting a hankering for something really sweet? A room temperature Hershey kiss unwrapped and melting right in the center of your tongue, until you can't stand it anymore and munch it up? Shhh. The kids are asleep. The kitchen light is off. Go ahead. Eat the whole bag. Happy, happy mouth. Am I right? Or maybe you are the type of person that hides your Ghirardelli dark chocolate squares in the freezer next to the Haagen Daz behind the cheap generic stuff you buy for the kids.

No? Not a chocolate person? Okay, then your mother's bread pudding with sweetened condensed milk and rum sauce. Or warm butterscotch pudding with whipped cream. Maybe it's an ice cream sundae or fresh-from-the-oven pecan pie that you crave. Strawberry shortcake, blueberry pie, buttercream frosting right out of the can....

Now, imagine being on a desert island with no sweets in sight. I am on that desert island. Well, not really, I'm in New England, which is definitely not a desert, and I'm pretty sure not an island. But for the last two years, I have not eaten chocolate, or pudding, or ice cream, or pecan pie. No sirree, no sugar for me at all. And I refuse to eat that substitute stuff that masquerades as sugar. Yuck to Splenda, Equal, NutraSweet. Yuck, Yuck, Yuck.

So, let me tell you, when I found something sweet I could eat a few weeks ago, I went hog wild. I started trying liquid Stevia extract in all kinds of crazy foods. Just to see.

The best so far is...

Mascarpone Mock Cheesecake

1 container (8 ounces) mascarpone cheese
4 drops liquid stevia extract, chocolate raspberry flavor
1/4 cup flax meal, divided in 2 parts
2 tablespoons room temperature salted butter, divided (if you don't have salted butter, whip in a pinch of salt)
Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder

Ok, I just had to laugh, because when I checked the mascarpone for the container size, i noticed it says "Half the calories of butter". As if! If you are stooping to eating an entire container of mascarpone, you might as well eat butter. If you are trying to count calories or cholesterol, this is not the recipe for you. If you have avoided all sweets for the last 24 months, or are trying to bulk up for the ESPN2 strong man competition, by all means, try it.

Back to work. Using a spatula, get every last morsel of cheese out of the container and put it in a good sized bowl. Put in 4 drops of liquid stevia. Mix it till you can't stand mixing anymore. Stevia is powerful stuff. If you don't mix it up well, you will alternate between impossibly sweet bites and bland ones. Not good.
Now coat the inside of two ramekins with as much of the butter as you can get to stick. Press the flax meal into the butter. Scoop equal parts of the mascarpone mixture into the ramekins and press it down to even the top. Dust with a touch of cocoa powder.

Get a spoon. Wait til everyone has gone to bed. Eat both of them. It probably keeps in the refrigerator, but I've never kept it long enough to know.