One of my favorite things about fall, along with the leaves and being able to wear large sweaters around the house, is the food. Apple orchards open for the season, and I find myself going there every couple of weeks to grab a few apples and maybe a pumpkin or two. Given the time of year, I found myself browsing Pinterest for something seasonal to cook. Two recipes caught my eye.

I had seen some variation of both recipes before. Regular cheesecakes take around 45 minutes to cook depending on the size. Then they cool for about 5 hours. Now if we could get rid of all that, then you could have an almost instant cheesecake. And being the impatient person I am, I figured I had to try it.

The grilled cheese sandwich was a whole different story. While I’ve had plenty of grilled cheese sandwiches over the years, I have never heard of putting apples in one. It sounded odd to put fruit with cheese, and while the pictures I had seen on the Internet showed something that looked good, I was still a little apprehensive about the idea. But you never know unless you try, so that’s what I did.

No bake pumpkin cheesecakes

This is a rather simple and easy recipe to follow including various spices and making your own whipped cream. These are textured more as a mousse than a cheesecake, which was unexpected but still enjoyable, and complemented the flavor rather well. The cookie crumb base was sweet and didn’t overpower the taste of the cake itself, and the caramel drizzle that they advise you add to the top gave the cake an added sweetness to combat the taste of the pumpkin puree and unsweetened cream, that would have been slightly overwhelming without it.

Based on the amount of whipped cream and the aromatic pumpkin puree, the recipe as a whole was extremely well balanced, calling for just enough cookie to give it that traditional cheesecake feel, while taking an untraditional turn and making it bakeless. Having a great appreciation for balance, I give the recipe five out of five stars.

Cinnamon apple grilled cheese sandwich

Now this recipe was odd. It had everything it needed for a regular grilled cheese sandwich, including the cheese, bread and apples that I had expected, but then it called for cinnamon sugar butter spread. I had never seen it or even heard of it. The name was rather self-explanatory, but it sounded odd (much like the sandwich itself). We eventually found it in a small brown container in the dairy aisle. 

The first thing I noticed while making this was the aromatic quality of the butter. It was very strong and in the beginning I feared that I had used too much. It smelled nice, though, so I continued. The next thing I noticed which was rather troublesome was that as the sugar in the butter melted, it made the bread soggy, and while the cheese melted normally, the bread did not toast the way one would expect it to. This made it difficult to turn the sandwich over when it needed to be flipped.

The sandwich itself tasted surprisingly alright. The cinnamon complemented the apples and the apples gave the sandwich a little extra taste, which took me aback a little. I wondered why I’d never tried this before. I had a few qualms with the sandwich. For instance, the melted sugar left my fingers sticky afterwards, but the taste made up for that.

Overall I give this recipe four out of five stars. I believe the amount of butter it calls for on each side may be too much, which may be why the bread becomes soggy and hard to handle when cooking.