Recovering from Turkey Overload

early Thanksgiving

Hey all! For my U.S. readers, I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving! I got to celebrate Turkey Day twice! We get together every year with friends of ours for an early Thanksgiving and then we spend Thanksgiving Day with my husband's family.

We didn't host early Thanksgiving this year, so I didn't have to worry about making a turkey, but I did make my favorite gluten-free cornbread stuffing.

I also volunteered to make a pumpkin pie. But when I was going through my "recipes to try" folder, I found a recipe for Swirled Pumpkin & Chocolate Cheesecake that I had torn from Woman's Day magazine last year, and I just knew that I needed to make THAT instead.

This recipe combines three of my favorite things: pumpkin, cheesecake, and chocolate. How can you go wrong?

Well, perhaps I was using the wrong type of pie pan (What the heck is a spring-form pan and why don't I own one?) but I had A LOT of batter and it didn't all fit in the pie pan. I baked this with a baking sheet underneath to catch any spillage.

And I swear to you my melted chocolate looked like melted chocolate until I melted it. But then I had to add it to part of the batter and it no longer looked as pretty. I did my best to swirl it into the other batter, but I might have messed it up. I'm not sure what happened to cause those cracks in the top. I had never made a cheesecake before this, so I guess I was just unprepared for what it would be like.

Anyway, despite the look, it actually tasted fine. Everyone said they liked it! If you like cheesecake and you like pumpkin, then you should definitely make this. Just don't be alarmed if it looks weird.

I was unable to make the cheesecake gluten-free for only one reason: my Celiac husband doesn't eat pumpkin, so it seemed silly to make something he won't eat anyway gluten-free. I'm sure it would be easy to make this gluten-free. You'd just need to find some gluten-free chocolate wafers, which I'm sure exist somewhere, to make the crust. And then everything else is pretty much naturally gluten-free.