Recipe: Pumpkin Cheesecakes

You American readers are lucky in that we Canadians have our Thanksgiving a month earlier, thus you get test-driven recipes just in time for you to plan your Thanksgiving spread.

This year, I got pumpkin cheesecake on the brain back in September. One member of the family being diabetic, and on a low-fat diet as well, gave me the perfect excuse to try Fat Free Vegan's Double-Layer Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe. While I am a meat-eater, I love vegan and vegetarian recipes. I really feel like I'm doing something good for my body when I eat them (especially as I seem to be developing some sort of dairy allergy/intolerance).

vegan to the left of me, dairy to the right, stuck in the middle with food

I'm not posting the actual recipes in this post, but you will get the results of the taste-test. After hearing me blather about the tofu-based cheesecake in the grocery store, the boyfriend did suggest I make two cheesecakes, and that one include actual cream cheese. The other recipe I used was from The Joy of Baking (minus the sour cream topping).

Now, our Thanksgiving dinner was on Sunday night. I worked right up until I hopped in the car to go to dinner, and my last day off was the Monday, so these cheesecakes were prepared in steps, in the dark, cold evenings after work. I made the crusts on Friday night, and baked the cakes on Saturday night, so they'd only sit in the fridge for a day.

Saturday night, after coming home from work and eating dinner, I got started. I decided to start with the dairy-containing one first. That all went very well. By the time it was in the oven, it was 9pm or so at night (I do most of my baking late at night). Then I lined everything up to start the vegan cheesecake. I was very excited to find out what Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese tasted like, so I opened that first. What I found was green, and fuzzy.

the rum is called for in the recipe, and I didn't even drink any when I found the green fuzz

By 9pm, my local market was of course closed. I swore. I pulled out the Wii and played a round or two of Mario Kart. While driving recklessly off cliffs, I was doing theoretical math in my head.

"If I work at 11am tomorrow, and the store opens at 10am, but my boyfriend doesn't work until 12pm... is that enough time to buy stuff, make cheesecake and bake it? If so, will it have enough hours in the fridge before dinner..."

The answer to those questions was a resounding YES. Just. The boyfriend had to take it out of the oven and into the fridge so he wouldn't be late, but we did it.

And the results (when asked 'Which do you prefer?' poll of 8 guests):
Vegan Cheesecake: 8
Dairy Cheesecake: 1

the leftovers

Everyone agreed that the vegan was tastier! Even AFTER we told them it had tofu in it! I voted for each, because no pumpkin cheesecake can be bad in my mind. I do think the dairy version could've done with 10 more minutes in the oven, so that may have evened out the scores, as the main selling point for the vegan one was texture.

I've been eating both in the week since (I LOVE leftover desserts) and still like both. The tang the lemon juice gives to the vegan one gives a great refreshing kick.

double-layered vegan tastiness