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.
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| 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
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| 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!
