Remi's Birthday (Pumpkin Cheese)cake

My love's 27th birthday is this Sunday. Yay! To make things even better, he decided to take the week off. We wanted to take a little vacay, but we have horrible planning skills so we're making it a wonderful staycay. We've had a pretty good week so far. We're eating at some of our favorite restaurants to celebrate. We had some good Mexican yesterday. I finally had fish tacos some (I didn't like them nearly as much as I thought I would). Then today we had Fuji Hana sushi (I had waited wayyyy too long to eat, so I was a little monster, oops). Tonight I'm making a birthday cake for us to nibble on until Sunday. It's in the oven as we speak... er, I type and it is smelling like a kazillion bucks. I almost passed out as I rang up $25 worth of ingredients for it, but I'm told it will be worth it. It's a pumpkin cheesecake if you can't tell by my title and its another recipe that I'm copycatting the super healthy way... lemme tell ya how.

Pumpkin Cheesecake
Roast

1 Small Sugar Pumpkin

with a bit of water for about an hour at 350 degrees. (I saved 50 seeds to plant next year and roasted the rest with a spray of olive oil and a dusting of salt. Exciting!)
While you're waiting for the pumpkin to get tender process

20 gingersnap cookies

1/4 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup melted light Smart Balance margarine

to a fine fluffy crumb.
Just before the pumpkin is ready you can start to mix the batter by processing or electrically mixing

3 8oz packages Neufchatel cheese

3/4 cup Splenda

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 T molasses and

1 t vanilla

Remove the cooked pumpkin meat from the rind by scraping it with an icecream scoop. Add 1 cup to the cream cheese mixture. Then add

1 t cinnamon

1/4 t all spice

1/4 t nutmeg and

a pinch of freshly grated ginger.

Stir in

3 well beaten eggs

by hand to prevent cracks. (Mine cracked anyway, but not too bad)
Bake for 45 minutes or so, then refridgerate at least 12 hours.
Good with some fat free Rediwhip.

I haven't tasted this yet, but my house smells like Heaven right now. I'm really exicted to taste it. I want it to last until Sunday, but I'm making no bets. I'll let you know how it tastes tommorrow. Yay!