Awake

Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie Made With Fresh Local Pumpkins

This is the story of how I, mistress of the microwave, actually baked a Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie and how it actually turned out magically delicious!

First, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon last weekend, I rode my bike down to White's Produce, a country produce market, which is about a mile away from where I now live. I picked up two sugar pumpkins and brought them home to sit on the counter for two days while I pondered the fact that I was about to actually bake something without adult supervision.

To prepare the purée, as per my friend's instructions, I roasted the pumpkins 'til they were very soft and squishy. The house smelled like Thanksgiving. Now I was excited.

On my lunch break in Ashland, I happened to have lunch at Allyson's of Ashland (they have a wine cellar and deli downstairs and a very charming gourmet kitchen store upstairs). I picked up some cheesecloth and was then ready for the next step.

That evening when the pumpkins were cool, I removed the string and seeds and gently separated the flesh from the skin. I mixed up the purée and placed it over cheesecloth in a strainer in a bowl and let the water seep out of the mixture in the fridge overnight.

Finally on Saturday night, after a week of debating between pumpkin bread and pumpkin cheesecake, after finding a recipe on the interwebs for sugar-free pumpkin cheesecake, after gathering all of the ingredients from the grocery store, and after going back to the grocery store to get what I forgot, I finally was ready to begin.

First I made a graham-bunny crust. (Graham bunny?) Yes. The second trip to the store for what I forgot was for graham crackers in order to make the crust. But every box of graham crackers I picked up either had partially hydrogenated oil or high fructose corn syrup in it. Finally, with some assistance, I found a box of Annie's Graham Bunny snacks (the organic counterpart to "Teddy Grahams"). I made crumbs using the Cuisinart Mini-Prep which worked beautifully, by the way. The resulting crust was delicious, even Grandpa said so. :)

Then I made the cheesecake layer using lower fat cream cheese and then the pumpkin layer with my pumpkin purée made from fresh local pumpkins. (Yum!) I substituted sugar with Splenda to make the dessert virtually sugar-free so that Grandpa (who has controlled type 2 diabetes) could enjoy it too. The two 9" pie pans weren't quite enough to hold all of the pumpkin mixture, so after filling it to the very brink of spilling over, I made another mini crust for a small dish and made a little mini pumpkin pie dish with the leftover pumpkin mixture.

I baked the pies and when the fork came out clean :) I took them out of the oven and you know what? They looked goooood! And they smelled good too! I was amazed! I baked the little baby pumpkin pie and left them all to cool overnight. This morning I put them in the fridge to chill. This evening Grandpa and I each had a slice of my Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie and enjoyed it thoroughly! Success!

I'd have a picture for you but my camera battery is dead after a day of taking pictures of the Rogue. This wouldn't usually be a problem except that my camera's A/C adaptor cord has frayed and is no longer functional. Luckily I found a replacement on eBay for cheap which is shipping tomorrow, so problem should be solved in a few days. :)