Pumpkin Chocolate Cheesecake

Jordan: Pie Month is technically over, but with Thanksgiving so late in November, we didn’t have a chance to share our holiday desserts with you, and it seems a shame to hold onto these for a full year.
Kitra: Plus, it’s always pie month in our hearts.
And cheesecake is a perfect transition recipe, since no one really knows how to classify it.
I’ve been making pumpkin chocolate cheesecake bars for yearsssssss.
Way way back in the day, Kitra used to get daily Better Homes & Gardens emails to our shared email account, and this came from that phase.
See also that blueberry charmer from a while back.
There were also what must have been monthly batches of lemon rosemary cupcakes… but the pumpkin chocolate cheesecake bars were the highlight.
And it seemed like there was real potential to make them flashier. They’ve already got three layers, but in a bar it’s kind of hard to tell. So why not magnify the whole thing!
Besides, cheesecake bars—while convenient—don’t have that show-stopping Thanksgiving dessert vibe that a full-sized cheesecake does.
Plus, we wanted to keep our forks working their full-tine jobs. (This joke killed me, and Jordan hates it. You decide.)
We also made two other pies for Thanksgiving. (Yes, we only had six people and two of them were children, this is a perfectly acceptable pie-to-person ratio.)
We hit the three categories of Thanksgiving pie: Orange, fruit, wildcard (Nut? Custard? Jello? Whoppers?)
Nothing but a pie tin full of Whoppers. Just like grandma used to make!
That was an autocorrect that we ran with. Anyway.
Our fruit pie was a pear version of Molly Yeh’s hawaij apple pie, which I liked but Kitra found too imperfect to share on the blog. (Though let’s all appreciate the beautiful pie crust braids she did on the top of that one.)
I’d recommend the pie we made last year if you’re looking for a spiced pear pie.
The other pie was a maple buttermilk custard pie from the Four and Twenty Blackbirds cookbook. It reminded me of the period where I ate maple-yogurt overnight oats for breakfast every day, in the best possible way. Mapley and tangy and very simple to put together.
It was delightful, but we just made my ideal custard pie so anything else was going to be a bit of a letdown. Also, I just have something against sour cream.
Still, if you have the cookbook (or want to try any of the versions floating around other blogs), it’s worth making.
If you’re looking for a dessert that pulls out all the stops for your holiday tables though, look no further than the cheesecake.
