Pumpkin Cheesecake

It’s Halloween and I’m helping to throw a Halloween party.  As part of that I’ve made a pumpkin cheesecake (recipe courtesy of Good Housekeeping).  It’s my first attempt at a real cheesecake and not one of those refrigerator varieties.  I think it’s turned out well, though I have yet to cut into it as the party is tonight.  The recipe isn’t overly complicated.  There is a water bath, but it’s nothing too hard to deal with.

This is the mise en place for the graham cracker crumb crust.

The graham cracker crumbs and sugar go into a bowl.

Then get mixed together with the melted butter until thoroughly coated and slightly moist.

The crust gets pressed into the bottom of a springform pan.  The crust then gets baked for about 10 minutes to set up.  After cooling on a wire rack, it is ready for the cheesecake batter.

Next up is the batter for the cheesecake.  This is the mise en place for it.

First, the cream cheese gets mixed until it is smooth.

Then the sugar gets mixed in.

The pumpkin, sour cream, and spices also get mixed in.

Finally, the eggs get mixed in, one at a time.

After making sure that the batter is thoroughly mixed, it goes into the springform pan.  The pan here is wrapped in aluminum foil and placed into a large roasting pan.  The foil helps make sure that no water gets into the cake since the springform pans isn’t water tight.

At this point, boiling water goes into the roasting pan and everything goes into the oven to bake for an hour to an hour and a half.

While the cake is baking, the topping can be made.  This is the mise en place for the topping.

It’s a quick and easy topping.  Everything just goes into a bowl.

And gets whisked together.  When the cheesecake is nearly done, the topping should be spread on top the cake.  The cheesecake goes back into the oven to bake for another five minutes.

Here is the final cheesecake cooling on a wire rack after baking.

Sour Cream Coffee Cake

This week I’ve baked a sour cream coffee cake.  Coffee cake does not actually have any coffee in it, but rather it is a cake that is often served and eaten with coffee.  This recipe comes from a different book from the Culinary Institute of America: The Culinary Institute of America Cookbook: A Collection of Our Favorite Recipes for the Home Chef.  This book, as you can see from the title, is unlike their other books in that it is targeted at the home kitchen.  It produces much smaller quantities and uses volume measurements for just about everything rather than weights.

Here is the mise en place for the coffee cake.  I’ve got too much butter out here, all you really need is 3/4ths of a cup.

This is the measured ingredients for the streusel filling.  Were I to make this cake again, I would make a second batch of this streusel, omitting the chocolate chips to use as a topping.  Also, if you like nuts, then some chopped nuts would go nicely in this streusel.

The streusel should get mixed and then set aside until later.

Then the dry ingredients also get mixed and set aside.

The wet ingredients, except the sugar and butter, go into a third bowl.

Then they get mixed and set aside.

The butter and sugar go into the stand mixer.

This was my issue with this recipe.  This is the fourth bowl I’ve had to use to make one coffee cake.  You could probably go without the bowl for the streusel and mix it in the bowl for the dry ingredients, but that still leaves you with three dirty bowls.

The butter and sugar get creamed together with the paddle attachment.  Then the dry and wet ingredients get mixed in, alternating them, a third at a time.

Then half the batter goes into the pan.  I’m using an angel food cake pan here, but a Bundt cake pan, a loaf pan, or any cake pan would do.

With half the batter in the pan, top it with the streusel mixture.  Then you can swirl it into the batter slightly with a wooden skewer, so that you don’t end up with just a flat layer of streusel in the final cake.

The streusel then gets topped with the other half of the cake batter. 

If you made streusel for topping the cake, you would put it on top the cake now.  Or depending on the cake pan, you may want to put it into the pan prior to adding any batter.

The coffee cake is done when it is golden brown on top and a skewer comes out clean.

After cooling for a while in the pan, it should be removed and moved to a wire rack to complete cooling.

And of course, here is a close up of the coffee cake, ready to be served.