Give thanks.

Thanksgiving week was a busy one here.  Naturally, I make all the sweets for the table.  There was, of course, the traditional pumpkin pie.  It's also tradition to have buckeyes at the table being that the Ohio State vs. Michigan game now always falls on Thanksgiving weekend.  Finally, I decided to make a hybrid red velvet cake and cheesecake.  Bellies were full.

Of course wanting to bake a pie from as scratch as possible, I assumed I would be roasting a whole pumpkin and pureeing the flesh.  When I took to Google to get the logistics down, I stumbled across this Forbes article explaining why canned pumpkin is better for pies.  As it turns out, the pumpkin Libby's grows and cans is really more of a squash and resembles the butternut squash more so than it does the pumpkin.  In fact, the article concludes with some tips if you're really dead set on baking a farm to table pumpkin pie.  The last tip is to simply use a butternut squash; none would be the wiser.  Now, I LOVE me some butternut squash.  I will grill it up in steak-like strips and eat that for dinner on its own.  My husband enjoys my butternut squash ravioli, but you wouldn't catch him noshing on a strip of squash.  As he was the one insistent on a whole pumpkin pie, I caved and used the canned stuff.  I felt like I was cheating.  The only thing I could do to balance things out was to make the crust from scratch, which is also alarmingly simple.  I didn't get a good picture of the pumpkin pie, but let's face it... without a decorative crust (which mine was lacking), if you've seen one pumpkin pie, you've seen 'em all.

Ditto for the buckeyes.  Although I use a combination of peanut butter, cashew butter, and almond butter and dip them in dark chocolate, they look just the same as the traditional bunch.

But now, we move on to the show stealer... the cheesecake stuffed red velvet cake.



As you can see, I jazzed it up with a little ombre frosting.  So here's the nitty gritty on this cake.  It's only a 6 inch cake, but also came in at about 6 inches high as well.  There are three layers: the top and bottom are red velvet cake, and the center layer is pure cheesecake.  The whole thing is frosted with a traditional cream cheese frosting, using the rose method.

Wanna see the inside?  Are you sure??

 

 

Here's another one up close, just to get you really salivating...

Despite the overindulgence on turkey, this was a smash hit!!