Calories don't count today, right?

Last year for my birthday I made a super delicious, rich, chocolate peanut butter cheese cake.  Behold:

But that was last year... what to do to top this year?

I started thinking that something with cherries and chocolate would be pretty good.  I looked all over the internet and I didn't find what I was looking for. I saw cherry cheesecake with chocolate topping, and then chocolate cheesecake with cherry topping.  None of these appealed to me.

So I settled with a homemade "no bake" cherry cheese pie.  Simple and basic. 

While I was making it, my mom reminded me of a few things I should have checked before I started: her recipe, and the cherry cookbook that I got for Christmas.  I pulled out the book and found that there was a black forest cherry cheese cake... oops.  That might have been just perfect for what i wanted.. but a las, I was already well on my way with my original plan. 

I winged a graham cracker crust recipe.. melted butter, a packet and a half of graham crackers, and some sugar.

I adapted this recipe for the filling and followed some of the recommendations in the comments section of whipping the heavy cream before adding it to the cream cheese, and substituing some of the lemon juice with vanilla. 

I also decided to throw on some crumb top.  I found Marth'as recipe (sans alcohol, shocking, right?) and threw that on top.

I finished about half of my piece, which is disappointing after hyping this dessert up in my mind for the past week.  First of all... I should have used my mom's recipe.  When I was in high school I could sit down with the entire pie and eat it in one sitting.. on second thought, maybe this is better for my waist line :)