Pumpkin Cheesecake

Steps

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  1. First, clean a fresh and sweet «dessert» pumpkin out of a dense thick rind and cut it into small and not too thick pieces for the pumpkin to be cooked in the oven or in a microwave oven finely. Bake it until complete softening, the pumpkin flesh should be grinded into puree easily. Depending on the type and method of baking you may need from 20 to 35 minutes.
  
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  2. Cool soft pumpkin pieces slightly, start grinding it with an immersion blender or in the bowl for cocktails, as you wish.
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  3. Add soft cheese and vanilla to pumpkin puree. Continue breaking the lumps and grinding.
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  4. When the consistency of cottage cheese and pumpkin puree becomes completely homogeneous and, one might even say «smooth», you can stop whisking. To fasten the entire curd mass we will use potato/corn starch. It is better to dissolve it in a small volume of cold water and pour the resulting starch milk in pumpkin-cottage cheese mass. If the pumpkin is juicy and therefore the sauce turns out watery, it is better to enter the starch through a strainer (!) right in the pumpkin puree, in small portions and immediately mixing the starch with the mass to avoid lumps.
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  5. Now we only need to enter eggs and sugar in the cottage cheese mass. We suggest you to divide them into whites and yolks, whip the egg yolks with sugar, and then add the resulting lush yolk-sugar mass to the curd basis. In turn, whisk whites with a pinch of salt.
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  6. Then send whipped egg whites to the cottage cheese mass, dividing them into small portions. Thus, we will achieve the most gentle and homogeneous, «suffle» structure of the cheese layer in comparison with what you would get if you just put the eggs in the curd at the stage of mixing of the products.
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  7. It remains to pour the resulting bright and airy cottage cheese in a detachable form. Pre-cover the bottom with parchment paper and grease the sides with any oil without smell using a brush. Bake pumpkin cheesecake without excessive structures or water baths – at the usual 180 degrees for about 40 minutes. Do not let it fry or darken on the top somehow. When the specific baking cracks begin to appear on the top of the cheesecake, indicating the evaporation of the excess of moisture, it can be removed.
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  8. At the initial stage, this cheesecake is very unstable – surely let it cool down, and just when it is chilled, remove, decorate, cut and taste it! A simple pumpkin cheesecake with cottage cheese is ready!
  
  Bon appetit!