This is our nephew’s annual choice for his birthday cake. It’s adapted from the Ruggles Grill recipe, which is excellent, but we are happy with the adjustments we’ve made (taking chopped peanuts out of the crust – made it too oily) and swapping regular PBCs out for the seasonal ones that have a better peanut butter to chocolate ratio.

Use ONLY a 10-inch springform pan. Otherwise, it won’t cook in the middle.

• 4 -5 cups crushed cookies or graham crackers¹
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 2 pounds softened cream cheese
• 5 eggs, at room temperature
• 1-1/2 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
• 1 cup creamy peanut butter. Seriously, use Reese’s brand if you can get it.
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 12 Reese’s peanut butter cups, OR, as is our preference, 6-8 Reese’s holiday trees or 10-12 skeletons. The Valentine’s Day hearts sink to the bottom, so we can’t recommend them.
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 275 degrees and move rack to center of oven. To make the crust, crush cookies or graham crackers in a food processor. Mix the crumbs with the melted butter, then lightly pat the mixture onto the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan. Set aside.

For the filling, break or chop the peanut butter cups into chunks, and set aside. Beat cream cheese in a stand mixer until it becomes light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each one. Add sugar, peanut butter,² and heavy cream, and mix just until smooth. By hand, stir in vanilla and the peanut butter cups. Pour the filling into the crust.

Tightly wrap the bottom of the springform pan with aluminum foil.³ Place the springform pan into a larger baking pan – ideally, one that is not deeper than your springform. Bring a couple of cups of water to boil. Put the baking pan, with the cheesecake in it, on the center rack of the oven. Carefully pour the water in the baking pan (you do not want to splash water into the batter), until the water comes up about 1 inch on the sides of the springform pan. Bake for about 1-1/2 hours, or until the top of the cheesecake is firm and lightly browned.

Just before the cheesecake is done, combine the sour cream and 1/2 cup sugar in a small bowl or cup and mix with a fork until smooth. When the cheesecake looks done, spread the sour cream on top of the cheesecake and then bake for about another five minutes. Remove cake from oven⁴ and cool on a wire rack for about an hour. Then put it in the refrigerator for at least four hours to chill and set.

Tips and Tricks

1. The original recipe called for Oreo cookies, but a lot of bakers didn’t realize that if you use Oreos, you must scrape every possible bit of the frosting off the cookies. We don’t have that kind of patience. We’ve substituted Oreo Thins (which have no frosting), vanilla wafers, and graham crackers, and all have worked beautifully. Next year, we’re making peanut butter cookies and letting them dry out before pulverizing them into crumbs. We think that will be awesome.
2. When you have to put sticky ingredients into measuring cups, it helps if you lightly butter the insides or hit it with a quick blast of nonstick spray.
3. If you don’t wrap the bottom in foil, water may leak into your cheesecake. You will not be happy about this.
4. We strongly disapprove of taking a cheesecake out of the oven into a cold kitchen. The better approach is to turn the oven off, stick a wooden spoon in the door to give the oven some air and allow the cake to cool down more slowly – at least half an hour.

Finally, we confess that we never bother with a water bath, even for temperamental egg custards. The purpose of a water bath is to evenly distribute temperature, create a creamy texture, and prevent the top from cracking. In our experience, if you’re baking at a low temperature (275 degrees or less), and use that wooden spoon trick to slow the cooling, your bake will turn out fine. You might get a tiny crack in the surface, but we couldn’t care less about tiny cracks in the tops of baked goods. And our last word is that if you use Philadelphia Cream Cheese and beat it until fluffy, you won’t have to worry about insufficiently creamy cheesecake.