Marriage Made in Heaven

And then there was....

I guess they liked it!

This year I decided to shift away from the traditional pumpkin pie. Many years ago I had enjoyed a pumpkin cheesecake with a carrot cake crust, so I decided to try to replicate that. It seemed to work quite well. 

• I prepared the ingredients for a carrot cake recipe and for a pumpkin swirl cheesecake recipe. 
• I prepared a 10" springform pan and preheated the oven. I put foil around the pan as I planned to bake the cake in water. The last time I tried this the water leaked into the crust and made it very gooey. (However I decided not to use the water bath as I decided that if the cake was browned, or cracked, it wouldn't bother anyone in my household!)
• I mixed the dry ingredients for the carrot cake in one bowl, and the liquids in another.
• The stand mixer was used to beat the cream cheese and sugar. I removed some to leave plain, and added the pumpkin and extra sugar to the remainder.

• The wet and dry ingredients of the carrot cake were mixed together and the batter was poured into the pan and smoothed.
• Half of the pumpkin cheesecake mix was carefully put on top and smoothed.
• I added dollops of the basic cheesecake, then the rest of the pumpkin and carefully used a knife to 'cut' the pumpkin/basic cheese mixture to swirl it. 
• I baked the cake at 325 for an hour and an additional 15 minutes, until the cheese mixture was setting. I turned the oven off and let the cake sit in the oven another 20 minutes just to be sure.

The end result was quite yummy, as you can see from the first picture! 

A few things I will do differently next year:

I reduced the recipes to two thirds of the original ingredients. This was fine for the carrot cake, but I would have preferred more cheesecake on top. (What was I thinking?!! Oh, wait... I was thinking that I didn't have enough cream cheese.... Ha - next year I will buy enough!) Having more cheesecake batter to work with might have let the swirl work. It looks swirled in the pan, but on the plate, it looked like layers. I figured since I had two recipes of cake, reducing the amount would still fill a 10" pan. Not so! Next year I'll use the 9" pan, 2/3 of the carrot cake recipe and the entire cheesecake recipe. The finished cake did not crack and was not overly dark, so I will choose not to mess with the aluminum foil or the water bath.