This Pumpkin Cheesecake Requires No Baking

We all know that oven space is at a premium during the holidays and while I already have a classic baked pumpkin cheesecake that I've made videos of and shared and it's amazing, I wanted to share a no-bake version. You're not going to use the oven at all, not even to bake the crust. It comes together so easily and it's also great for making in advance. So let's start with our crust. Again, no baking required. You can make it It's a slightly spiced graham cracker crust that I love. a couple days before you need to serve it. You will need one and a half cups of graham cracker crumbs for starters. Put that into a bowl. Then we'll add three tablespoons of firmly packed light brown sugar. Typically, crusts will use mostly granulated sugar or a lot of granulated sugar. The brown sugar is just going to give you more depth and kind of make it a little bit more fall festive, and it works really well with the spices. Which we'll talk about in just a second. But I want to talk about our butter first. You will need seven tablespoons of melted salted butter for this recipe. Now I'm going to add the spices in with the butter while it's still just a little bit warm. That's just going to help bloom them a little bit and give them a slightly deeper flavor, make your crust taste better all over. We're using a half teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a half teaspoon of ground ginger. Just kind of whisk these into the butter. The butter should not be very warm when you add it to your sugar and your graham crackers. If it's too warm, it can actually make things greasy, but it's great if it's a little bit warm when you add your spices. So whisk those in, give that butter a second just to cool a bit, and then over here, I wanna mix my sugar into the graham cracker crumbs till it's nicely distributed. So long as our butter is not too hot, you can drizzle this in. I know it doesn't look super pretty, just trust the process. Of course, we'll scrape the bowl in case any of those spices are settled at the bottom because we don't like to waste butter around here. And then just use your fork to kind of claw everything together until the ingredients are well combined and you want all of the graham crackers to be moistened. Otherwise, they're not going to stick together and you won't have a really nice crust. No dry crumbs remaining. Do a quick double check. All right, this cheesecake is going to come together in a nine-inch springform pan. Just pour the crumbs right in there. It's stuck to the side. And I'm just going to use a glass to press the crust up the sides and firmly and evenly into the bottom of the cheesecake. Sometimes it's easier if you do the sides first and then worry about the bottom. You do wanna press it nice and firm all over. And I like to press this pretty high up the sides of the pan because the cheesecake filling is also going to go pretty high up the sides of the pan. Why is this crust giving me so much trouble? I feel like I'm spreading it thin, but I usually like to go up pretty high. That way the batter isn't taller than it. All right, so I was pretty intentional about making sure my crust went up pretty high around the whole springform pan. If you're struggling... Don't stress yourself out. It's okay if yours doesn't go up this high. I'll show you how to remove the cheesecake from the springform pan without having any issues after it has chilled completely. So yours doesn't have to be quite this high. While I'm preparing the cheesecake filling, I'm just going to pop this in the refrigerator, not the oven, no need to bake it, and that's just going to help it set up a bit while we're making the filling. All right, let's make our filling. You will need a large mixing bowl for this. Our first ingredient is 16 ounces of softened, And full fat cream cheese. Very important that you're using the brick style, not the tub style. Tub style is not, or it's very likely to not set up properly for you. I wouldn't want you to risk it. And cream cheese that is not full fat also has the tendency to be really soft or yield a really soft cheesecake, especially an no-bake one, which is relying on that fat for structure. So this is 16 ounces and it should be nice and softened. I think I mentioned that. Before we go any further, We're going to use an electric mixer to beat the cream cheese until it's smooth and creamy and lump-free. Now of course you can use your stand mixer for this recipe if you prefer, today I'm just going to be using my electric mixer. All right, smooth, creamy, and lump-free. All right, I'm going to take a quick look at this with my spatula, make sure it looks nice and smooth. Think we're good here. So next we'll add our pumpkin. This is one cup of pumpkin puree. You're not going to use a full can, just one cup. No blotting it or anything like that, which makes this a really nice and easy recipe. We'll also add 1/4 cup of firmly packed light brown sugar and then two tablespoons of sour cream. If you've made any of my other cheesecake recipes you know how important I think sour cream is. It adds an extra depth and tanginess that you can't get from cream cheese alone. Otherwise I feel like the dessert can just taste a little bit kind of shallow and flat. We trialed this recipe with no sour cream, two tablespoons, four tablespoons, and I think we did another variation as well. Two tablespoons was a sweet spot. It's just enough to give you that balance and depth without making it taste like sour cream. We'll also add vanilla extract. We'll be Teaspoon of vanilla extract, my homemade vanilla. Oh, little bonus right there. I talk about this a lot, but I actually am not someone who goes too crazy with vanilla. You know, people say, oh, I measure it with my heart. Too much vanilla can kind of remove the depth and balance from your recipe and make it taste too much just like vanilla. Vanilla is great, I love it, don't get me wrong, but you really wanna have a nice balance of all the flavors. We'll also add our pumpkin spice. This is one tablespoon of pumpkin spice or pumpkin pie spice. If you can't find it in your grocery store, you can make it. It's just a blend of a couple of spices. I have a video and a blog post about how to make it. It's really easy. I'll try to remember to link to that. And I also... I think that a good pumpkin pie flavored dessert should have just an extra kick of cinnamon. So we also add a half teaspoon of ground cinnamon, and then we just need a little bit of salt. We're only adding 1/8 teaspoon of table salt to this recipe. Cream cheese already has salt in it, and that goes a fair distance here, so you don't need a whole lot of salt. All right, the entire pumpkin pie or pumpkin cheesecake recipe is using 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, and that's what I have measured out here. I'm going to add half of that, which is, Three-fourths cup, but I'm just going to eyeball it. It does not have to be precise at this point. I'm adding about half of the powdered sugar in here. This other half is going to be whipped with our heavy cream, that way we have a really nice stable whipped cream, but adding some here makes this mixture a little bit thinner and is going to make it easier for us to combine the two when we get to that step. So keep your mixer on low speed, gradually stir everything together. You can increase your speed once you... Anytime you're mixing something you want to stop periodically pause and use a spatula to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl There's always some ingredient or another that's trying to hide there, and we'll get back to mixing Already smelling pumpkin-y. This is nice and smooth, well combined. Beaters out. Going to need some clean beaters for our next step. Grab yourself another mixing bowl for our whipped cream. Now, we're going to be whipping our own cream instead of using like, you know, a store-bought whipped topping, so this recipe is really homemade from scratch, has a really good flavor, and in order to do that, you'll need one cup of heavy cream. This should be nice and cold, straight from your fridge. Pour it into a mixing bowl. We're going to add the rest of our powdered sugar, 3 fourths cup of powdered sugar, or if you eyeballed it like I did, whatever's left in your bowl. And whipped cream can be whipped by hand. It's just quite an arm workout, so I prefer to use my mixer here as well. Start on low speed and gradually increase the mixing speed to high, and just beat it until you have nice, stiff peaks. The mixture should be thick and fluffy and luminous. This is looking nice. Let me show you what I'm talking about here. Thick, it's fluffy, the peaks that form when you pull the beaters out. Hold their shape. I don't know how well you can see that. I wanted to show you on the spoon. Let's see. It's holding its shape. See that? It's like that tub of whipped topping you get. It's really thick. It's really fluffy. It's really substantial. So this is going to go right in with our other ingredients. And one thing that was really important to me when I was developing this recipe is I didn't want to use gelatin to stabilize it. Gelatin can be fussy. Sometimes even the unflavored stuff kind of has a little bit of a flavor. It's just a pain. So by stabilizing our whipped cream really well with powdered sugar, We get a nice texture that's very sliceable and very much like a baked cheesecake without having to use gelatin. You don't want to use your mixer at this point, you just want to gently fold everything together. Because of how we prepared our cream cheese mixture, it should be pretty easy to do. All right, this looks great. Let me grab our cheesecake crust, put that carefully. We are going to drop this filling into the bottom of the crust that we prepped. So something to be really mindful about when you're making this recipe is it's really important that the filling Go directly up against the crust. So I like to be mindful as I'm pouring this in or kind of spreading it in, that I'm pressing it against the crust. Because anywhere that you leave a gap and the filling isn't touching that, when you cut into it, it's just going to crumble away. It really needs to kind of glue itself together to the filling while it chills. If you leave space, it won't have the opportunity to do that. Now remember this cheesecake is not going to bake. Usually when you put a cheesecake in the oven it doesn't matter if you have any ripples in the surface or anything they'll just level out while they're in the oven. Since this one's just going in the fridge when you take it out of the fridge it's going to look exactly the same as when you put it in the fridge except it'll be more solid. So I like to try to make the top nice and smooth. And look I did make my crust too tall. I felt like I was when I was making it. No worries. All right now of course this is a no-bake cheesecake it needs to chill in order to set and become firm and sliceable. Pop it in your fridge and let it chill. Overnight is best. I say at least six hours. Have I gotten away with four in the past? Yes, but I really recommend at least six hours. And I have one I made last night. I'm gonna do a little cleanup and I'll bring that one to you. All right, I realized my crust issue when I was putting that cheesecake away. I had my springform pan bottom on upside down, so the pan was a lot deeper than it should have been. That's why my crust is seeming so funky today. But it shows you how far that crust can stretch. So here's my cheesecake I made yesterday. Say your crust didn't go up quite as high as this one. What you would do is you would just take a sharp knife while it's cold and you would run it around the outside. So I like to do this anyway with my crust just to keep it adhering to the cheesecake and not the pan. I don't want any of my crust to come off with the pan. Just use a sharp knife and go around and then you can carefully remove the springform collar. See when you feel your springform pan bottom, there should be like a lip underneath. I didn't have that, I did it upside down. All right, just like pumpkin pie, there should always be whipped cream with a pumpkin pie cheesecake. This is a half batch of my homemade whipped cream. I just put it into a piping bag with my Attico 848 piping tip, which is like one of my favorites. And we'll just decorate the outside perimeter. Sometimes after adding the whipped cream, I will grate a little bit of fresh cinnamon over the whipped cream. I think I did that for my photos. Time to cut in. This is always the part that makes me nervous. First slice is always the messiest slice. As you can see, it's totally sliceable, it has a really nice creamy texture, it's perfectly spiced, it's really easy to make, and it's not going to use your oven. If you try this, I would really love to know what you think. As you know, I'm not a big pumpkin person myself, or a pumpkin pie person myself, so I had so many different people test this and give me their feedback. And also, of course, I did have to also like this before it made it onto video and the website. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time. All right, the moment of truth. I'll try to cut it awkwardly for me so you guys can see on camera how it's... It's like a real, I mean, it is a real cheesecake. It's a creamy baked cheesecake. It's super sturdy. I'm really excited for you to try this one. Have another bite. Try to jump into my hands. All right, now the entire recipe is, now the entire recipe, and look, I totally did make my crust too tall. And look, I did totally make my crust.