Award-Winning Pumpkin Cheesecake

Last Saturday I participated in a pumpkin dessert cook off with my sister. My sister loves pumpkin. LOVES pumpkin. Before October even rolls around she has planned what she is going to bake. So you can see why we decided to enter. We chose to bake a pumpkin cheese cake from allrecipes.com.

Ingredients 

2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 (9 inch) prepared graham cracker crust
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 pinch ground cloves
1 pinch ground nutmeg

Directions 

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar and vanilla. Beat until smooth. Blend in eggs one at a time. Remove 1 cup of batter and spread into bottom of crust; set aside.
3. Add pumpkin, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg to the remaining batter and stir gently until well blended. Carefully spread over the batter in the crust.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until center is almost set. Allow to cool, then refrigerate for 3 hours or overnight. Cover with whipped topping before serving.

For this cheesecake, make sure that everything is room tempature, especially the eggs and the cream cheese. This will help your cheesecake not to crack during baking. Another technique you can use to prevent cracking is to bake the cheesecake in a water bath. For a water bath, make sure you surround the spring-form pan with aluminum foil (to prevent water coming into the pan), then place the spring-form pan on top of a jelly roll pan filled with boiling water and bake

The recipe for the Gingersnap Crust:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups crushed gingersnap cookies
1/2  Finely chopped walnuts
1/3 cup butter

We combined these ingredients in a bowl and then pressed the mixture into the pan untill evenly distributed. Then we baked it in the oven for ten minutes at 350 degrees F.
  

 We then made an easy caramel sauce to decorate with. We also decorated with candied pecans and more crushed gingersnaps.

The end result was moist, rich and lighter than a pumpkin pie. The crust was crunchy and had a perfect spicy taste that complemented the pumpkin flavor and candied pecans perfectly. The caramel sauce added a sweetness that with the extra crushed gingersnaps created a match that must have been made in heaven. Unfortunately, even with the pumpkin obsession of my sister and all of our hard work, we only got second place. Next year however....