Brown Sugar Pumpkin Cheesecake

By á-8915

Ingredients

• Brown Sugar Pumpkin Cheesecake with Chocolate Shortbread Crust
• Crust (See the original Chocolate Caramel Tart here.)
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 5 Tbls. unsweetened cocoa powder (not sweetened hot chocolate mix)
• 1/4 tsp. kosher salt
• 10 Tbls. butter, diced and softened
• 1/2 cup + 2 Tbls. confectioner’s sugar
• 2 egg yolks
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• Filling
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
• 1 Tbls. cognac
• 1 15-oz. can 100% pure pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
• 24 oz. cream cheese (that’s 3 8-oz. bricks), at room temperature
• 1 3/4 cups dark brown sugar
• 4 eggs
• Makes 1 9-inch cheesecake

Preparation

Step 1

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-inch springform pan with butter or oil and set it aside.

Put the powdered sugar and butter in the bowl of your stand mixer (or in a large bowl if you’re mixing by hand).
Beat together until well combined.
Toss in the egg yolks and vanilla. Beat until well combined.
The mixture will be thick, fluffy, and a pale, buttery yellow.
Add the flour, cocoa powder, and salt.
Beat until the dry ingredients are well combined. You want the mixture to be a uniform color and texture. It will feel kind of like Play Doh.

Scrape the dough out and plop it into your pan. With your hands, press the dough so that it lines the bottom and sides of the pan (stop maybe a half an inch from the top edge).
You want the dough to be relatively even in thickness, but don’t make yourself nuts.
Prick the dough in several places with a fork. The butter in the dough will release steam as it bakes, and those holes allow it to escape—and keep your crust from getting big air bubbles.
Pop the pan into your pre-heated, 350-degree oven. Bake it for about 20 minutes, until it’s completely opaque in color and the edges are starting to brown.

When it’s done, yank the pan out of the oven and set it on a wire rack to cool. If you do have air bubbles under the crust, poke one or two very small holes in the crust and gently press the air out to deflate it.

Make the pumpkin cheesecake filling
When your crust has cooled to room temperature, make the filling.

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. (If you left your oven on, don’t forgot to drop the heat. The cheesecake itself bakes at 25 degrees cooler than the crust.)
Put the cream cheese in the bowl of your mixer. Beat it to break it up.

Add the brown sugar.
Beat until light and fluffy.
Toss in the eggs. (I like to break them into a separate bowl before adding them to the mixing bowl. It’s easier to fish out any little bits of shell that wind up in there by accident.)
Beat well to incorporate the eggs. The mixture will be a thick, soupy light brown, kind of like melted chocolate ice cream.
Toss in the pumpkin.
And the cognac. (I keep a bottle of cognac in the house for baking, but if you don’t want to bother with it, you can totally substitute vanilla extract.)
Beat to combine. The filling will be thick and creamy.
Toss in the flour and pumpkin pie spice.
Beat gently to combine.
Bake the cheesecake!
Pour the filling into your cooled crust.
Pour it just until it fills the crust. Depending on how high up the sides of the pan your crust comes, you may wind up with a little extra filling.
If that’s the case, grease a few ramekins and bake the leftover filling by itself, as a pudding. It’ll be just delicious. (Serve garnished with a couple of shortbread cookies.)
Pop the pan into your pre-heated 325-degree oven. Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes, until it *looks* set (i.e. firm and opaque) but the center jiggles a little when you move the pan.
Turn the heat off, crack the oven door about 4 or 5 inches. Leave the cheesecake in there (with the door cracked open) for an additional 3o minutes.

Yank the cheesecake out of the oven when that last 30 minutes is up. Then, cool it in the pan on a rack for another 30 minutes. Then, pop in the fridge for at least 6 hours or overnight before serving.