I spent a good bit of Saturday evening into the night buying the ingredients and baking the cheesecake for our Thanksgiving dinner Sunday. It was my first time making the recipe. I wanted something with cinnamon, and I found this cinnamon roll cheesecake recipe searching the web. It turned out delicious.
I finally bought a springform pan. In the past, I’ve just used my parents’, but I needed one that day and figured it was finally time to get one. This one is “non-stick”. That may just mean stuff will stick a little less and it will get scratched up more easily, but it seems nice and durable.
The only real modifications I made to the recipe were:
- turbinado sugar for sugar (gives it a bit more texture)
- earth balance for butter (less saturated fat)
I used organic cream cheese because I was at Whole Foods and was hoping to get everything I needed there, but ended up needing to go to Giant Eagle anyway.
It took some time to prep and a lot of cook time: almost two hours in the oven. I assume it was the low and slow with a long cooldown that made this the first cheesecake I’ve made that didn’t crack. It was so thick though that it came a bit above the edge of the pan and poofed up quite a bit while cooking. When it cooled, it luckily sunk back down mostly into the pan, but the edge of the cake was left hanging over the edge of the pan a bit. That meant I had to lift the cake up through the ring of the pan when taking it off. Besides for the difficulty pushing it through that way, it detached surprisingly easy and with no damage.
It didn’t look nearly as nice as the one pictured on the website. I couldn’t get straight frosting lines, so I just covered the whole top. Probably should’ve cooled the frosting beforehand. Still, looked good enough and transported well.
The cake turned out very tasty and everyone really liked it. They complimented it and said it was restaurant quality. It was rich and sweet, hard to eat a lot of it, especially after eating a big meal beforehand. I left them with a slice and a half each for later and took home a big hunk of the remainder. I will eat what I can and freeze the rest.