Olive Garden Pumpkin Cheesecake

Every Halloween through Christmas, my mother seeks out pumpkin cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory and Olive Garden. Olive Garden's is her absolute favorite, until I made this recipe. This is the best pumpkin cheesecake ever! Maybe it tastes better than the one at the restaurant because Olive Garden's desserts are shipped frozen to the restaurants from being mass produced in factories. Making this version from scratch gives it a fresher, spicier, and more delicious flavor. For the crust, ten whole graham cracker rectangles yielded 1 ½ cups of graham cracker crumbs, and 27 gingersnap cookies yielded 1 cup of gingersnap crumbs. I used a 9.5 inch spring form pan for the cheesecake. A nine inch would have worked also, but a ten inch would have been too big for the amount of filling. Brown sugar made the perfect sweetener for the crust, cheesecake filling, and sour cream layer. To lessen the guilty feelings , I substituted reduced fat Neufchatel cheese for the cream cheese and low fat sour cream for the Sour Cream Layer. To thicken my watery sour cream, I poured off the whey on top, and wrapped the remaining 1 ½ cups of sour cream with clean paper towels to let rest in a colander for one hour while the cheesecake baked. After the sour cream drained, it was thick, creamy, and reduced to be one cup. After baking, the top of the cheesecake had a matte finish with no deflating, cracks, or bubbles. Adding the sour cream layer and baking for 10 more minutes gave the top of the cheesecake a glossy pearlized porcelain finish. For the whipped cream, I substituted Spice Guru's recipe for Whipped Cream Topping in his recipe #491289 recipe. It has heavy cream, sugar, vanilla, and dark rum (I used Bacardi Select Dark Rum. Furthermore, I plan on making his sure-to-be-divine pumpkin pie recipe soon.) Thank you, kimcroft, for a recipe for Olive Garden Pumpkin Cheesecake that is unbelievably better than the real one!

I make this recipe every year for thanksgiving and Christmas. Been making it for 5 years now. Make sure to wrap the canned pumpkin in paper towels for an hour before adding it to the mixture. I bake the sour cream layer 5 extra minutes personally. Make sure also to let it sit in your fridge overnight :)

OMG! This is BETTER than Olive Garden! I am eating lower-carb and my husband is diabetic, so I made a couple of adjustments that made this about 9 carbs per serving. Everywhere the recipe called for sugar or brown sugar, I used Splenda in equal amounts. For the whipped cream, I was going to use Lite Cool-Whip but decided to just make the whipped cream with Splenda and it turned out perfect. For the crust, I replaced the graham cracker crumbs with 1 and 1/2 cups of almond flour, but I still used the ginger snap cookies, so there were some carbs in the crust, but subbing the almond flour for the graham crackers really cut down on the carb count. Since I used the almond flour, I baked the crust for 12 minutes at 350 degrees and then allowed it to cool before filling. The crust was even better this way because it did not get soggy later on. For the caramel sauce, I used store-bought, sugar-free in a squirt bottle and warmed it in the microwave a little before using. I also used a 9" springform pan. Even with the substitutions, this was better than Olive Garden and it was so good that it even fooled my neighbors, who LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, Olive Garden's pumpkin cheesecake. We invited the neighbors over and told them we ordered pumpkin cheesecake to go from Olive Garden. I gave them each a slice, garnished with sugar-free caramel sauce and a light sprinkle of crushed ginger snaps. I wanted to see if they could tell the difference so I waited until they were half-way through before telling them the truth. Both of them raved about how Olive Garden had the best pumpkin cheesecake on the planet and how this time it was just extra flavorful. When I revealed that it was actually a recipe I found online and that I had adjusted it to make it relatively low-carb, they were both floored and amazed that I was not only able to make this at home and it tasted even better than Olive Garden's, but that it was only around 9 carbs per serving! Thank you for this fantastic recipe. I have made it 3 times in the past 6 months and will be making another one in the very near future.

LOVED how this cheesecake came out! Thank you for your tips and your copycat recipe, it was so good! Just a couple more tips...I think foil around the bottom of the springform pan would prevent the butter dripping from the crust. Also, using a food processor is the best way to crush the graham crackers and gingersnaps.

This cheesecake is awsome. My wife was craving the Olive Garden punkin cheescake, but with 3 kids going out to eat is not always so much fun. I looked at mant recipes across the internet trying to mimic the Olive Garden cake, but all were completly off. This is the the only one I could find that was even close.