Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake

Have you ever had to choose between a pumpkin pie and a cheesecake?

It happens sometimes, especially around the holidays, when you have to face the impossible task of winnowing your dessert choices. It’s heartbreaking, really. And I find it most especially heartbreaking around Thanksgiving, which offers an abundance of dessert choices. Do you want pie? Cool. Will that be apple or pumpkin or something else? Do you want cake with that? How about a cheesecake or a trifle?

It’s all so much to choose from! Choosing all of the above options will surely make you miserable. But! It doesn’t have to be that hard. Some people like to pretend otherwise, but I think we all know that Thanksgiving is THE pumpkin day, where all other choices are just stand-ins. It’s just not Thanksgiving without a pumpkin pie.

I will admit though, even as someone who eats leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast on Black Friday, pumpkin pie can seem kind of boring, especially when putting it up against flashy cakes or dramatic deep-dish apple pies or that interloper pumpkin cheesecake. It’s just so…humble. Basic crust, plain whipped cream topping (if any), and filling that bakes into the color of the saddest, brownest leaves that always seem to fall last off the tree. Pumpkin pie is not a pretty dessert.

HOWEVER.

I think I’ve stumbled on the solution for a lot of the above. Too many desserts? Combine them! Basic & boring? Layer flavors! Ugly color? Add contrast!

All of that can be done with this simple pumpkin pie cheesecake. And no, I don’t mean “pumpkin cheesecake,” I mean “pumpkin pie cheesecake.” Because this tastes like a pumpkin pie dipping its toe into the cheesecake waters. The texture remains closer to a pumpkin pie, but it bakes up with the tartness of a cheesecake and a sour cream topping to boot.

We have flavor!

We have color contrast!

We have a pie and a cheesecake!

Plus, we have a ginger cookie crust because that is the correct choice here. Is that almost like three desserts? We are nailing this!

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Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake

For the crust:

• 2 cups ginger snaps, crushed into fine crumbs

• 1/2 tsp ginger

• 1/4 tsp cinnamon

• 1 tbs flour

• 3 tbs butter, melted

For the filling:

• 1 can pumpkin puree (15 oz)

• 1/3 cup brown sugar 

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1/4 tsp fresh grated nutmeg

• 1/4 tsp cloves

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• 1/2 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 8 oz cream cheese, room temp

• 1/4 cup sugar

• 2 eggs, lightly beaten

For the topping:

• 12 oz sour cream

• 2 tbs sugar

• 2-3 ginger snaps, crushed

1. Make the crust: In a bowl, combine crushed ginger snaps, cinnamon, ginger, flour and melted butter and stir to fully coat the crumbs. You want the mixture to be pretty damp but not wet. Add a little flour if it seems too wet. Press the mixture into the bottom of an 8 inch springform pan, and chill until you are ready to bake.

2. Preheat your oven to 350 and make the filling: In a small pot, combine pumpkin puree, brown sugar, salt and spices. Stir to combine, then cook over medium low heat, stirring frequently, until mixture darkens and thickens, about 45 minutes. The mixture will be very dark and smooth at this point, like apple butter.

3. Scrape the pumpkin mixture into a bowl to cool. Meanwhile, in the bowl of a stand mixture, place your cream cheese and beat with paddle attachment until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the cooled pumpkin mixture and beat to fully combine, then add the eggs and vanilla and beat to combine, scraping down the bowl as needed to fully incorporated the cream cheese with the pumpkin mixture.

4. Scrape the filling mixture into the prepared pan on top of the crust and smooth the top a bit. Place the pan on top of a baking sheet and bake on the middle rack of the oven for 30-35 minutes, until the cheesecake is set but still a little wobbly in the middle.

5. Remove cheesecake from oven and increase the temperature to 450 degrees. Combine the sour cream and 1 1/2 tbs sugar and stir to fully mix, then spoon and spread atop the baked cheesecake. Return to the oven and bake 7 minutes to set.

6. Remove from oven and cool completely. Chill and serve, topped with more crushed ginger cookies.

"My" Salad Dressing

It might seem weird to put quotes around a possessive here for “my” salad dressing. No, I promise you I do know how to use quotation marks, mostly (someone tell me definitively, do I put the punctuation inside or outside when I’m ending a sentence?). But really, I put the quotes in because I associate ownership of this recipe more with David Lebovitz. It was from his blog where I first got the idea to repurpose leftover salty feta into a salad dressing, and after rereading that post, now I know he actually got the idea from the Joy of Cooking.

You can follow that attribution chain if you like, but on this blog, the ownership of this dressing was bestowed on me by my brother in law, Ryan, who requested I make this dressing during a visit to Boston by asking for “your salad dressing, you know, that one you made one time!”

No, I didn’t know! I have a salad dressing?? Apparently, yes!

That “one time” was way back in December 2017, when I wanted to make a creamy dressing for a wedge salad, but neither I nor my sister like blue cheese dressing, so I needed a substitute, and Claire had some feta in her fridge. I added some vinegar, herbs, and olive oil and blended it all up, and I guess “my dressing” was born.

And really, it doesn’t matter who lays claim to owning this recipe, everyone should be making it! If you make anything with feta you probably have some leftover, and the rest of the ingredients can be whatever favorite vinegars, olive oils, and dried or fresh herbs you have on hand, plus a little ground pepper if you like. I add shallots whenever I have them. And you can even keep it simple and just mash it all into a chunky dressing or go the extra step and blend it until creamy, both are equally delicious.

Whatever you do, just use the good stuff, ok? That pre-crumbled feta isn’t going to work very well here. If you do insist on using it, well, you are the master of your own kitchen, so I can’t stop you.

But in that case, we’ll extend this ownership chain and you can call that “your” dressing, ok?

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Feta Salad Dressing

Inspired by David Lebovitz

• 4 oz feta (a good quality block of it, not pre-crumbled)

• 1 small shallot, minced

• 1/2 tsp dried oregano (or thyme, parsley, etc)

• fresh ground black pepper

• vinegar (sherry, apple cider, red wine, whatever your preference)

• extra virgin olive oil

1. In a bowl, add the feta, shallot and oregano and mash together. Add a little black pepper, then add vinegar, mashing as you add it until you get a loose paste-like consistency. Add in enough olive oil to form a liquid dressing, loosening with a little water if needed (or more vinegar). At this point, you can either serve as is, with small feta chunks visible, or blend the dressing to a creamy, smooth consistency.

2. To serve, toss with your favorite salad ingredients. The dressing works well as a sub for blue cheese dressing in a wedge salad. I especially like it tossed with fragile butter lettuce, radishes sliced paper thin, chives, and sliced avocado, pictured here above.

Banana Pudding Cream Tart Cake

Yes, I’m jumping on the cream tart bandwagon!

I’ve seen these cute cakes all over Instagram and Pinterest, often large, letter-shaped creations topped with fruit, meringues, macarons, and flowers. A quick internet search tells me they started with Israeli baker Adi Klinghofer, and they pretty much exploded from there. Once I saw these as a challenge on The Great British Bake-Off I knew they had gone mainstream. I’m definitely a year late to this trend, but since no one I know had any idea what I was talking about when I tried to describe these cakes, I’ll pretend to be a trendsetter at least in my own life. These cakes are stunning to look at but most importantly to me, they didn’t seem all that difficult to make!

One thing that I realized though, in my search for some specifics of how exactly people were making these cakes, is that there isn’t a ton of variety to the recipes. The most variation seems to come in the cookie part, usually a sable base, but sometimes a sugar cookie, sometimes flavored with almond, sometimes vanilla. The filling seems to be a choice between cheesecake, pastry cream, or a stabilized whipped cream, sometimes with a curd added between the layers. And then you can top with whatever you want, but otherwise, that’s pretty much it.

There seemed to be, at least to me, a glaring omission here.

You have vanilla cookie. You have creamy filling. You can top with fruit and more cookies.

HELLO???

No one has thought to turn this into banana pudding?? I couldn’t believe it!

I set out to fix this egregious error, and it.was.fabulous. I baked off 6-inch rounds of vanilla sable dough, piped layers of a creamy, cheese stabilized whipped cream, filled the gaps with banana pudding and chunks of banana, and topped the whole thing with more whipped cream, sliced bananas, and mini nilla wafers (along with some quick mini meringues I made from the leftover egg whites from the pudding recipe, very very optional).

Once everything chilled and softened, I sliced into it, and yes, it was banana pudding! Just a bit neater than the version you might find at your family barbecue.

Or…would you? Turns out, there might be a reason why no one had made this type of cake into a banana pudding version. Banana pudding is kind of divisive! I discovered this when trying to give away some of the cake so that I didn’t eat the whole 6 inches myself. Out of three people, one told me she hates banana pudding, one hates bananas, and finally it turned out one looooved banana pudding. So that’s a roughly 33.3% occurance rate for banana pudding lovers. Who knew?

But for those of you out there who do like bananas and you like them in pudding, trust me, this is a cake for you!

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Banana Pudding Cream Tart

Pudding recipe adapted from Cook’s Country, pate sablee from Martha Stewart.

For the pate sablee:

• 6 oz unsalted butter, softened

• 1/2 cup + 1 tbs powdered sugar

• 3 1/2 tsp vanilla

• 1 1/2 cup all purpose flour

• 3/4 tsp salt

For the Banana Pudding:

• 2 slightly underripe bananas

• 3/8 cup sugar

• 2 large egg yolks

• 1 1/2 tbs corn starch

• 1 1/2 cup half and half

• 1/8 tsp salt

• 3/4 tbs unsalted butter

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1 tbs lemon juice

For the whipped mascarpone cream:

• 8 oz. mascarpone (or cream cheese)

• 1/4 to 1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted (to taste)

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 1 cup heavy cream, chilled

For Topping (some optional ideas):

• sliced banana

• mini nilla wafers (or crumbled sablee)

• mini meringues

• mini macarons

• edible flowers

• fresh mint sprigs

• sprinkles

• banana chips

1. Make the sablee dough: In the bowl of an electric mixer, add the butter and sugar and combine on medium speed until the butter is pale and fluffy and fully combined with the sugar, then add the vanilla and mix to combine. Add in the flour and salt, and stir on low until everything just comes together, about 15-20 seconds. Turn the dough out onto plastic wrap and fully wrap in the plastic. Chill for at least one hour.

2. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350 degrees, and divide your dough into 4 equal portions. Roll and cut each portion into 6-inch rounds (I found this easier to do between sheets of plastic wrap), chill for 15 minutes, then bake for 12-15 minutes, rotating as needed, until set and lightly golden around the edges. Set aside to cool completely.

3. Make the pudding: Heat oven to 325 degrees, and place one unpeeled banana onto a baking sheet. Roast for about 20 minutes, until the peel is blackened, then let cool. Meanwhile, in a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, cornstarch and 1/8 cup sugar until smooth. In a pot, combine half and half, remaining sugar, and salt to a simmer over medium heat. Once this mixture is heated, slowly whisk in a bit of it into the yolk mixture, then pour that into the pot with the remaining half and half mixture and cook, whisking the whole time, until everything thickens and bubbles appear on the surface. This will be quick, about 1-2 minutes! Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the vanilla.

4. Transfer the pudding mixture to a food processor and add the roasted banana and 2 tsp lemon juice and run the machine until the mixture is completely smooth. Transfer to a bowl and cover with plastic wrap pressed directly onto the surface of the pudding and chill at least 45 minutes.

5. Cut remaining banana into small chunks and then toss with remaining lemon juice and set aside.

6. Make the whipped cream filling: in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whip the mascarpone or cream cheese on medium speed with the sugar and vanilla until loosened up and fluffy, then add the heavy cream and whip on high just until stiff peaks form, being careful not to overmix (the mixture can curdle if you whisk it too far). You want a firm mixture that can hold its shape when piped. Transfer the cream mixture into a piping bag and set aside.

7. Assemble the cake: once you have all your components prepared and baked off, you are ready to assemble. Take one of your cookie rounds and place on a cake board or a plate, and pipe a border of the cream filling around the outside. Then pipe about five blobs in the center and a few in between your outside border and the center. Fill the gaps between the cream filling with the pudding, and top with a few scattered pieces of banana. Top with another cookie round and repeat, until you have your final cookie round resting on top. Pipe an even layer of the cream filling atop your final cookie round, and then arrange your toppings as you like. Chill the whole cake for at least 4 hours to soften the cookie, then slice and serve. The longer you chill it the easier it will be to slice, but the pudding is best the day it’s made, so tread that line carefully!

Notes:

• If you want to go the more traditional route and use a vanilla pudding here, you can definitely do that! I really like banana though, and since the cake itself didn’t have as many bananas as a traditional banana pudding might, I decided to blend them into the pudding as well.