Cheesecake

I was feeling somewhat uninspired around Canadian Thanksgiving about what sort of dessert to try to whip up. My brain was thinking chocolate cake - which sounded like a terrible idea for Thanksgiving but delicious for most other locations.

In desperation, I hit Google and, amongst a list of other Thanksgiving-themed recipes came up with this recipe for "Crustless Cheesecake with Cranberry Sauce" (in which, strangely enough, all cranberry related elements were listed as optional). I didn't have a springform pan, kicking around, but managed to find the following on Superstore's shelves for a whopping $4.24, and Google suggested that you could peel a cheesecake out of one of these without breaking the thing:

(I've had a silicone loaf pan for years, but I still find the flexibility of silicone pans amusing)

Given that the "cranberry" cheesecake didn't seem to require cranberries, I googled a cranberry sauce recipe and came up with this. The cranberries seemed to "pop" earlier than suggested by the recipe but I decided to cook it down further.

With the cranberry sauce done and starting to cool I worked on whipping up the cheesecake batter and, on a whim, decided to try mixing about half the cranberry sauce into the batter.

The cheesecake seemed to turn out intact, and remembering I had a cake caddy kicking around (don't all bachelors?), it was off to party. Lots of dessert there so the entire thing didn't wind up getting downed, but it gave me the opportunity to photograph the leftovers:

I found a recipe for pumpkin spice latte syrup so perhaps the end of the month will be a good time to take a second stab at cheesecake-making - that one with a pumpkin spice theme.