Smoked Pumpkin Cheesecake with Gingersnap Crust

 

 When people start raving about pumpkin spice this and pumpkin spice that, what they're actually excited about is the spice, not the pumpkin.  The same spice blend works as well in an apple pie as it does in a pumpkin pie.  You know what's even better than pumpkin pie?  Pumpkin cheesecake.

For my crust I'll be using a stick of melted butter, 12 oz of Ginger Snap cookies, 3T of brown sugar, and 1t of pumpkin pie spice.  For the cheesecake, I'll be using 4 bricks of cream cheese, three eggs, a can of pumpkin, 1/3c heavy cream (I forgot to put that in the picture) 1T pumpkin pie spice and 1t vanilla extract.

I like to get my dry ingredients going first, and then pour in the melted butter.  I want a texture like wet sand.

I want to press the crust mixture tightly into the springform pan, getting some of it up the sides.  It needs to bake at 350* for at least 8 minutes.  I checked it at 8, and gave it 3 more minutes.  This lets the sugar and butter and cookie bind into a crust.

 

 

 

 

Four bricks of cream cheese. Adding 1/4 cup brown sugar…

 

 …1 cup white sugar…

 

 Let that blend for a couple of minutes while I pull the crust out of the oven to cool.

Back to the batter! I'm adding a whole can of pumpkin puree!

Once that's mixed in, I'm adding my three eggs..

...my 1/3 cup heavy cream...

...1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract...

...1 Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice...

 

Smooth as silk! Batter up!!

I kinda spun the pan and tapped the sides to get any bubbles to come to the surface.

This is going on the smoker at 250*F.  I'll check it after an hour and 45 minutes.

...after a little over two hours, it had the firmness I wanted, measured by jiggling the pan.

Plated and ated.

Total prep time on this was less than thirty minutes.  I used the smoker because doing a water bath seemed daunting and I wasn't willing to put in the effort of learning how to do one.  I've made cheesecake on the smoker before, so I knew what to expect and I knew that it was a gentle enough heat to keep the top from cracking.