Pumpkin cheesecake with salted caramel and pecan nuts

Today we bring you a special recipe to celebrate Halloween! We and our friends bloggers have decide to make something special and fun at once. We decided to fill up the internet with Pumpkins!

Have you ever heard of a Hop Blog? We neither...or at least we didn't until a week ago or so. How can I describe it? Well, it's a sort of "flash mob" made by bloggers: many different blogs decides to post about a single topic all at once at a given hour of a given day. This Hop Blog is pumpkin-themed. So, at the end of our post you'll find a lot of links that are our friends' blogs. They all talk about the same thing, there's a lot of fuss about the pumpkin there! You can find a lot of great blogs about many different areas of interest, DIY, decoration, recipes, you name it! Don't miss this chance, hop from a blog to another!

We all know how truly and deeply american Halloween is, so...what's better than having a great cheesecake? We love cheesecake, and to adapt it to this occasion, we decided to add a little bit of pumpkin to it, along with salted caramel (yummy!) and the uber tasty pecan nuts.

Detail of our Pumpkin cheesecake, or "Pumpcheese cake" 

Ingredients: (for a 20 cm wide mould)

For the base:

• 1 pack of Digestive cookie
• 2 tbsp of brown sugar
• 1/2 cup of well minced nuts (or the dried fruit you've chosen)
• 1/2 cup of melted butter

For the cake:

• 800 g.approx. of Philadelphia-like cheese
• 200 g. of sugar ( 150 brown + 50 white)
• 400 g. of mashed pumpkin*
• 1/4 cup of heavy cream ( 60 ml aprox.)
• 4 middle-sized eggs
• 1 tsp of Pumpkin pie Spice*
• 2 Tbsp of corn starch
• 1 1 tsp of vanilla

Pumpkin pie Spice

For the caramel topping: 

• 1 cup of sugar
• 1/2 cup of water
• 190 ml. of warm heavy cream
• 20 ml of unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp of salt
• 1/2 tsp of vanilla
• Pecan nuts to taste

Preparation: 

We'll use a springform cake tin some 20 cms wide. We'll start by greasing the pan and putting the baking sheet on the base to prevent the cake to stick to the pan.

Start with the base of the cake. To do so, mince the cookies and toss it all (the cookies and the rest of the ingredients) into our pan and press them with a spoon or a spatula until we get an uniform base. We want a base without edges and smooth. We put this aside.

For the filling, add the creamy cheese to our Kitchen Aid (with the leaf on) or our handheld mixer and mix it until you get a very uniform cream.

Next, add the mashed pumpkin and the sugar. Keep on beating at slow speed to avoid that the air enters into our cream.

Add the heavy cream and the corn starch. Add the eggs, one by one. We do not add another egg until the previous one is still not well incorporated.

Add the spices and the vanilla. Beat it all well (at minimum speed) and pour the mix into our mould, above the cookie base.

Next, we pop it into the oven at 150°C, we will cook it with above and below heat without fan for about an hour approximately.

When you take it off the oven, let it cool completely in a rack. To remove the cake from its mould it's better to avoid until it's cool. The best thing is to cook it the day before you eat it, in order to let the cake develop a great texture in the fridge. It's a very smooth cheesecake that will surely reminds you of a pudding.

Preparation of the salted caramel:

While our cake is in the oven, we can cook the salted caramel for our topping. To do so we take a pot, we add the sugar and the water and we heat it at medium-low heat until the sugar melts. Very important is to never stir.

When the sugar will have completely melted we rise the heat until we start seeing a golden brown colour (or about 8 to 10 minutes). Then we low a little bit the heat and we pour paying great attention and little by little the heavy cream (that we've previously warmed it up) and we stir energically with a wooden spoon. Be very careful on this step because the caramel cause painful burns (personal experience)

We turn the heat off and we add the butter, the vanilla and the salt, we stir it and there you have it! Let it cool and...try to resist the temptation to put the finger inside the caramel, because it burn!

We decorate our cake as we want, with the caramel, the pecan nuts and...let's enjoy it!

Do not forget to visit the other pumpkins!

Pumpkin time | . | Topper para cupcakes de calabaza | . | Calabaza en tacha | . | DIY: Calabazas pintadas | . | Calabazas, castañas, boniatos y bomboncitos | . | Blog hop Halloween | . | Calabaza tré chic | . | Bizcocho de calabaza especiado | . | Pumpikinized Portraits | . | La noche de Halloween, la leyenda de la calabaza | . | La magia de las calabazas | . | En otoño, calabazas… |. | Happy Halloween la calabaza scrappi | . | Pumpkin Cake with Ginger-Mascarpone Frosting |. | Detalles con calabaza | . | Smoothie de calabaza, piña y manzana |. | Y a ti, ¿te dan calabazas? |. | Globeando | . | Cheesecake de calabaza con caramelo salado y pecanas | . | Un cupcake para Hallowen: Pumpkin spiced cupcakes | . | Jugando con calabazas | . | La calabaza y la luz | . | Calabazas para Halloween : sello handmade & freebie | . | Kreativity | . | Adoptar tradiciones: calabazas de halloween  | . | calabaza + miel | . | Bruna Bruneta: Contes macabres

Coconut and Cinnamon Bundt Cake

Today we bring you our own C&C bundt cake (with coconut and cinnamon), a sweet and different cake , ideal for breakfast and teas.

Bundt cake comes from north America, and they seems to be related with Kugelhopf of Germany. Their typical golden brown colour define them, which is made possible by a mold called, appropriately enough, bundt pan. The peculiarity of those molds is that they presents a sort of "chimney", or a central hole, that allows the heat to distribute uniformly all around the surface of the cake. Those molds generally shows exhuberant shapes.

The word "bundt" began to appear related with this kind of cakes in year 1901 in a book called "The Settlement Cookbook" by Lizzie Cander. Then the firm Nordic Ware started to produce the molds that still nowadays are just so fashon. The very thick alluminium molds are based upon those, made of iron or ceramic, used in parts of Europe (overall in Hungary, Germany and Scandinavia) to bake similar cakes.
During the Fifties and the Sixties, these molds gained a lot of popularity, and we can find Nordic Ware molds even in design museums. The molds by Nordic Ware have even a National day in the US! It's the 15th of November...there you have, that day I want everyone baking his own bundt cake!

And now let us go with our recipe for this delicious bundt cake with coconut and cinnamon...call it how you like it best, bund, cake, bizcocho, ciambella, torta...the most important thing is that you try it!

Ingredients: 

• 200 g. of sugar
• 175 grams of butter at room temperature
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 spoonful of cinnamon powder ( 1/2 tsp)
• 350 g. wheat flour
• 1 pinch of salt
• 50 g. of dried coconut
• 250 ml. coconut milk
• 2 y 1/2 spoonful of yeast ( Royal)
• 1 y 1/2baking soda

To obtain the syrup:
-We will use the remaing parts of coconut milk, that is some 150 ml.
- 35 g. approximately of sugar.

Preparation:

1º- Start shaking the sugar with the butter for some minute, until the mix is well integrated and start looking somewhat white.

2º- Add eggs one by one, taking care that the previous egg is well incorporated before adding another one.

3º- In another bowl, add all the dry ingredients, that is the cinnamon, the flour, the salt, the baking soda and the yeast. Sift everything together and add to this ingredients dry coconut.

4º- Now add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, that is the eggs, the sugar and the butter. We will do it thrice, so that we can incorporate a third part of the dry ingredients and a third part of coconut milk, alternating and beating until we finish all the ingredients.
 
5º- Put some butter around the interior surface of our molding pan and add the mix. Bundt cake are typically rather dense, so do not worry, it will not result dry at all! Once we introduce the mix into the molding pan, flat the surface with a spatula and give the pan little hits against the table in order not to create air bubbles.

Before entering the oven

6º- We put our bundt cake in the oven that's been previously preheated at 180°C with no fan. Put the mold in the lower part of our oven, always above a grill and never above a tray, to let the air circulate in the central hole.

7º- Let it bake for about 40 minutes. When this time is over, insert a cooking needle into the cake to be sure that your sweet threat is ready. If we see that it is baking too much, we can add above an alluminium foil so that the cake will not burn.

8º- Whilst the bundt is in the oven, we can prepare our syrup to wet the cake. Put the coconut milk in a pot heating up along with the sugar, and when the latter melts, turn off the fire and put it aside. In this way we can use the rest of the coconut milk. This is an optional step.

8º-Take the mold out of the oven and let it cool above a rack for some 10 minutes.

cooling on a rack

9º- Use your cooking needle, a fork or a knife to open little holes the upper part of our bundt. Then pour delicately the syrup above our cake.

pouring the syrup above the cake

10º- In general terms, bundt cake are to remove from their mould some 10 minutes after they went out of the oven, but in this case, I would advice you to let the cake cooling for a little bit more, or until it is almost completely cold. This is because, being the cake wet, it can be particularly delicate to remove from the mold.

11º- Decorate it with dry coconut and...bite it right now! Yummy!

This bundt can still be super moist even after days. To preserve it better you can enroll it with a plastic wrap or put it into an airtight box, or you can even frost it...but you will see that you'll have no time to put it into the fridge!

Our Bowl felt in love at first sight with the curves of Bundt Cake of Nordic Ware!

Serve it with a jolly good tea and...have a nice time with your C&C bundt cake!

AnGie