Economic Research: Pumpkin Cheesecake

Friday 21 December 2012

Pumpkin Cheesecake

This pumpkin cheesecake is not only rich and delicious and seasonally appropriate; it was also the cause of a heated debate about baking, feminism and academia. Before I give you the recipe, here’s the story. When I was a young, energetic, bright-eyed first-year PhD student five years ago, a friend and I offered to co-host a departmental coffee hour. Every week, she and I would get together and bake something fun and delicious. Not only did my baking skills improve dramatically, but we also became inexplicably popular among my fellow students and professors. (Maybe it wasn’t that inexplicable.) Within weeks of starting my PhD program, everyone in the department knew my name. Every Thursday afternoon, our reading room was packed with Classicists jockeying for the last piece of pie. The coffee hours were stunningly well attended, and, by all accounts, a huge success. So when the time came to publish the yearly departmental newsletter, my co-baker and I were asked to submit a recipe from coffee hour. It was a little outside of usual range of newsletter content, which typically features faculty biographies, recent publications, and dissertation summaries. But the editor thought that the recipe would add some personality, and we were happy to contribute. We polled the department, and the almost universal favorite was the pumpkin cheesecake (in case you need proof that this recipe is awesome). We sent the recipe in.