Butternut squash cheesecake

This is a 6.5" spring form pan because I don't want excess sweets around for longer than a few days. This is a good size pan even for a party because people usually act all, "oh-just-a-little-piece-for-me" about dessert anyway, then I end up with half a gigantic cheesecake, or even a regular cake for that matter I really don't want it around no matter how good it is because then I must take it around and beg it off on people then go around again to retrieve my plates or feel compelled to eat it and I don't want that. How else do you imagine I maintain my slender boyish figure?

I intended to halve a successful recipe based on chocolate and apply that halved recipe to butternut squash. That didn't work out as I first visualized. I could tell I needed more than half the amount of cream cheese and it wasn't possible to halve three eggs. Well it is possible, but I didn't want to. So it's possible this mixture turns out a little bit eggy. Maybe not.

The mixture is made more interesting with sour cream, 1/2 cup in the original recipe, a few tablespoons for this one. The original has a chocolate ganache topping, this one has a topping of sour cream (+ sugar +vanilla).

I didn't want spices to discolor the mixture so I left them out, although I did like the ginger and orange from the previous pie so I put those things in -- grated fresh ginger and grated orange peel, so-called zest because it's definitely zesty. Pinch of salt. I started out with 1/4 cup sugar, tasted, deemed insufficiently sweet, then increased by a few tablespoons. Vanilla in the mixture, because everything's better with vanilla. Woot!

The crust is standard graham cracker crust except with ginger snaps comprising 50% of the biscuits used. Melted butter added to the crumbs and pressed into the pan to form a new cookie-type crust, just like normal, mindful that the ginger snaps had a little too much butter to begin with. Baked in a water bath on low heat (325℉) for 45 minutes. Allowed to cool down inside the oven with the oven door open, then chilled to set.