Thanksgiving: Desserts

The week before Thanksgiving, Nick's work had hosted an employee dessert contest. I'm not sure what the whole thing entailed because it was for employees. Nick had briefly entertained the idea of making marzipan and entering it, but he became too busy with a few of his pipe dreams taking off. However, the desserts were up for all of the employees to sample after the winners were announced. Nick came home that night raving about the variety and amount of sugars he'd had!

One of the desserts that really struck him was a pumpkin cheesecake. Neither of us had ever seen that before and he was very excited as he told me about it. He wanted me to try and see if I could make it.

The concept is simple--it's a layer of cheesecake topped with a layer of pumpkin pie. On first thought is sounds simple to make (and I still think it would be.) I should have put more thought and a little research into it.

I decided to do a graham cracker crust, because that is my favorite and I've never had a cheesecake in a pie crust. That was my first mistake. My second was that we don't have a blender or a set of egg beaters. The cheesecake part came out thin with lumps. The thin part soaked into the graham crackers and the lumpy parts formed a small layer of cheesecake wannabe. I had seasoned the cheesecake batter with nutmeg to complement the pumpkin that was going on the top. That part worked well; it was delicious.

I baked the cheesecake part before I poured the pumpkin batter on top. I'd figured that that was a no-brainer in order to get the seperate layers. And that was a good idea, it worked. The third problem that I had was that the pumpkin layer took forever to bake (I must have had it in the oven for over an hour!) and the graham cracker crust started to burn.

All said and done, the pumpkin cheesecake was not a total and epic failure. The crust wasn't too burnt to keep it from being enjoyable (and I'll take a graham cracker crust any way except charred), and the tastes were good. I used the recipe off the back of the can of pumpkin filling. I'm not sure what I did for the cheesecake, I was looking at three different recipes that I have and sort of added what I thought would work. And it would have if I'd had a set of egg beaters.

"Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!" --Ms. Frizzle

--Zizi