Saturday, May 14, 2011

Sweet Potato Cheesecake


A coworker always talks about this specific cheesecake his wife always makes. It comes from sweet potato and is a combination of sweet potato pie, pecan pie and cheesecake. We had to make it!

She actually got her recipe from AllRecipes. This is the base recipe we also followed. We scaled it down to "4" and made 4 individual sized cheesecakes in 8oz ramekins.


First you chop up or crush enough graham crackers to make a little more than 1/3 cup of crumbs.


You then need to line your pan/ramekins with wax paper if you are using anything besides a spring form pan. This deterred us a bit, since it seemed a little labor intensive to line four baby ramekins individually, but it ended up taking us less than 5 minutes! We found the most awesome tips on a YouTube Video! Be sure to baste each one in melted butter before lining. This is key.


You then mix the melted butter, graham crumbs, sugar and cinnamon/nutmeg (we added this).


Evenly divide the crumb mixture between your containers, or if you are using one just spread it evenly in that pan. Use a shot class or glass cup to pound down the crumbs. Then place the ramekins in the oven for 10 minutes (see recipe).


After the sweet potatoes have baked for an hour in foil (see allrecipes) let them sit until you can handle them. The peels will then just slide off. Use a knife to help you if they don't come of easily. We used 3 small potatoes which was way two much. One large one would have been fine.


We then pureed the sweet potato with our immersion blender. If you don't own one of these you should. It can mix/blend/chop/puree anything and you can use it with any bowl/cup you want to!


It is extremely important to blend the potato until it is no longer lumpy.


Make sure your cream cheese is room temperature. If it is cold, your cheesecake will be lumpy and not mixed properly. Add that into the sweet potatoes and mix for about 15-30 seconds. Then add in the white sugar, sour cream, heavy cream and cinnamon/nutmeg/vanilla (we added these). After you mix for one minute add in your egg. Beat until smooth, but don't overbeat. As soon as there are no lumps stop beating.


Pour mixture into ramekins evenly. To do this, we used our handy dandy 3 tbsp scoop.



We shook them a little to get them to even out flat.


Place them in a water bath. Next time, we will use individual pans for each ramekin. Bake for 45-60 minutes. It ended up being 60 for us because it wasn't until then that the tester came out clean. Let stand in the opened oven for one more hour.


Two were beautiful and two cracked a bit. As they cooled the cracks closed up though so it was ok. If you are using one pan you should put the cheesecake in the fridge over night before trying to get it out of the pan and making the topping. These, however, popped right out when we pulled the wax paper up.


To make the topping, chop up the pecans and follow the recipe instructions for the brown sugar and butter. Stay with the stove at all times because our heated up too quickly and we ruined the topping our first try. After we added the cream we also added some cinnamon and nutmeg. Our finished product:


After you put the topping on, let it stay in the fridge at least 6 hours. It tasted 10 times better once it was completely chilled. Yum Yum Yum!

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