Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake

It's Labor Day, which means another summer is finally on its way out the door, and not a moment too soon. After a couple weeks of 90 degree and higher temps, my boyfriend Zac and I started trying to will the cooler weather to descend upon New York by acting like it was fall. We purchased sweaters and boots. We roasted chickens and baked root vegetable gratins. And then, I made Bourbon Pumpkin Cheesecake.

The recipe has been around awhile: Gourmet magazine originally published it in 1990, then again in 2003, and I read it on one of the cooking blogs I like, Smitten Kitchen. It seemed like just the thing for our last "Let's pretend it's autumn!" weekend of the summer.

My fatal flaw as a cook is failing to read the complete recipe before I start. So it was 4:30 Sunday afternoon when I started on the cheesecake... and realized that not only would I have to chill the unfilled crumb crust for an hour, but also cool the baked cake in its pan for two to three hours AND chill it in the fridge for another FOUR hours! So it seemed this would not, in fact, be a dessert for Sunday dinner.

I went ahead with it anyway, doubling the crust recipe as suggested on Smitten Kitchen and popping it in the freezer to speed the chilling time.

I was supposed to whisk together the pumpkin, eggs, brown sugar, cream, vanilla, and bourbon; stir together the granulated sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and salt; then add the cream cheese to the dry sugar/cornstarch mixture before adding those combined ingredients to the pumpkin/egg mixture. But my secondary flaw as a cook is that I don't read recipes carefully enough, so I combined the cream cheese with the pumpkin/egg mixture from the start, so I think the cream cheese didn't get fluffed as much as it should have.  Luckily, this wasn't a situation where it really mattered.

The cake came out of the oven with a beautiful, smooth top, and we managed to let it cool for an hour and a half, then chill for about two hours before we gave up pretending we weren't going to eat it that night.

When I took the cheesecake out to add the sour cream topping, however, I realized that I was supposed to be put it on right after the cake came out of the oven and then bake it for five more minutes. Now that the cake was cool, well, that wasn't really an option anymore. I decided I'd just make some bourbon-spiked whipped cream to top each serving with, so I poured a couple glugs of bourbon into the cream before I stated whipping. It was probably about four times the amount of bourbon that would have gone into the sour cream topping, and was pretty overpowering (my third flaw as a chef is I don't always measure ingredients -- oh, and my fourth flaw is that I tend to be heavy-handed with booze). I think it also kept the cream from really whipping up. It thickened, but that was the best I could do. Overall, the whipped cream wasn't tasty, or necessary.

What I liked:

• The pecans in the graham cracker crust added flavor and texture
• Subtle pumpkin flavor kept it from being an ultra-creamy pumpkin pie
• Cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg weren't overwhelming like they are in some fall-flavored recipes
  

What I didn't:

• The cake was more cream than crumb - I like a cakier cheesecake. The center of the cake, in particular, reminded me of a flavored cream cheese for topping bagels with. Maybe baking the extra five minutes with the topping would have helped.
• The bourbon in the cheesecake was indiscernible. I think it could have used a little more.