Banana Cream Cheesecake

Kevin and I both love cheesecake and bananas, so I was really excited to try this recipe. It's actually a copycat recipe for the Cheesecake Factory's banana cream cheesecake, but I've never tried it from there so I don't know if they actually taste the same. I can tell you that this is a really good recipe! The original recipe can be found here. The only changes that I made from the original recipe was adding a little extra banana and a little extra vanilla.

Ingredients:

For the crust -
20 vanilla cream-filled sandwich style cookies (I used golden oreos)
1/4 cup melted butter

For the filling -
24 ounces cream cheese (at room temperature)
2/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3 eggs
3/4 cup mashed banana (I used 3 very ripe bananas)
1/2 cup whipping cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (I used 1 tablespoon)
whipped cream for garnish

Directions:

1. Use a food processor to finely chop the cookies. Add butter and blend until they are well combined.

2. Press mixture into the bottom of a 10" springform pan and smooth it out. Refrigerate the crust while you make the filling.

3. Beat cream cheese with electric mixer until creamy.

4. Beat in sugar and cornstarch followed by the eggs (one at a time).

5. Beat in bananas, whipping cream, and vanilla.

6. Pour mixture into crust.

7. Place pan on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes.

8. Reduce oven temperature to 200 degrees and bake an additional 75 minutes, or until center is almost set.

9. Allow cheesecake to cool completely before removing rim of pan -- Before removing the pan, run warm water over a knife and slide a knife around the edge of the cake to separate the cake from the pan cleanly.

10. Refrigerate cheesecake, uncovered, at least 6 hours.

Here's a picture of what my finished cheesecake looked like:


The good news is that it turned out sooooo good! It tasted great and didn't even crack at all. The bad news.......is that after Kevin and I each had a piece, I went to put the leftovers in the refrigerator and had a little accident :( I was trying to put the whole springform pan in the fridge and the bottom fell out and most of the cheesecake went all over the refrigerator! Maybe it was a good thing because we probably would have eaten all of the leftovers in a couple days, but I was really sad about this.....but the recipe was great so I will definitely have to make again sometime!