Bake-A-Long #5: Pure Pumpkin Cheesecake

I wasn't going to participate this week. I had tried this cake a few weeks ago when my coworker made it and knew that it was very good, but my sister was already making a pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving so I didn't think we needed two. However, Matt decided that he wanted to make this for his family's Thanksgiving dinner, so that's what we did.

We could probably nickname this cake the Pure Pumpkin "Recipe for Disaster" Cheesecake because we had several "oops" moments during construction. The first mistake was with the crust. I poured out the pecans onto a baking sheet for toasting without measuring, as I knew we would need some extra for garnishing. However, it was not me that started processing the pecans for the crust, it was Matt, and he just poured them all in thinking they were already weighed. So, when the pecans, gingersnaps, and butter were all processed together, we had a soupy mess. I then realized that he had used all of the pecans. I would guess that all of the pecan oil is what made the crust really liquidy. To thicken it up, we added a significant amount of ground gingersnaps. This seemed to work OK.

After this, the pumpkin and turbinado sugar were cooked and then processed with the cream, egg yolks, and cream cheese and baked in a water bath as indicated in the recipe. The cake looked good when it was finished baking (I forgot to take a picture).

Thanksgiving afternoon, we made the caramel topping. This was mistake number two. It took three times to make the caramel successfully. The first time, I burnt it (there was not enough volume in the sauce pan to take an accurate temperature with my candy thermometer. Burnt sugar = smoke = good thing we have an exhaust fan above our stovetop.

For our second caramel attempt, we decided to just stop cooking when the syrup began to brown and we also decided to add in some pumpkin pie spice since there were no spices in the cake itself. I though it would add a nice touch. So, when the sugars started to caramelize I took the syrup off the heat and dumped in some spice. I was a bit heavy handed when dumping in the spice and added more than I intended. We added the cream and butter and tasted the caramel to find that it was extremely bitter. I think the bitterness came from the excess spice and I also think I slightly overcooked the sugar.

So, third time was a charm. We didn't risk it by adding spice this time.

The cake turned out quite nice, but I think everyone was too full to fully enjoy it. I think the texture is the best part of this cake. Also, the extra gingersnaps in the crust turned out to be a nice touch, as the ginger flavor came through well. Matt had a piece for breakfast this morning. This leftover dessert for breakfast thing seems to be becoming a trend for this bake-a-long. But who wants to let a good dessert go to waste.