Mini Cheesecakes

folke (64)in #blog • 5 years ago (edited)

My husband and I just celebrated our first wedding anniversary! I have heard the tradition is to freeze a piece of your wedding cake to eat on the day of your first anniversary. Our wedding cake was one of my most favorite parts of the wedding. Cheesecake is my favorite dessert of all time, but the daunting price of such a rich wedding cake nearly squashed my dream wedding, until my amazing sister Laurie stepped in to save the day! As a result of her impressive talents in the kitchen, we had eight different varieties of cheesecake: raspberry, blueberry, apricot, chocolate chip, dark chocolate, mocha, caramel pecan, and classic vanilla at our wedding reception! While we didn't keep a piece for the anniversary tradition (we couldn't decide which flavor to choose!), I decided to recreate it, with mini cheesecakes!

24 vanilla wafer cookies
2, 8 oz packages cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup apricot preserves

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line muffin pan with paper or foil muffin cups. Place one wafer flat side down in each cup, and set aside.

In a medium bowl, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add the eggs, lemon juice, and vanilla. Beat well.

Fill muffin cups three-fourths full, and bake for 17 to 20 minutes, or until top is set.

Cool on a wire rack for 20 minutes, then top each cheesecake with 2 teaspoons preserves. Refrigerate until serving.

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I hand beat the cream cheese with the eggs, lemon, and vanilla, and as a result the batter was a little bit lumpy. Keep beating until the batter is as smooth as possible, but don't worry if there are a few small lumps. The batter puffs up during baking, then deflates when cooling. It seemed to help if the batter was evenly distributed in the muffin cup. I actually used a regular sized muffin pan, so the vanilla wafers were smaller than the bottom of the muffin cup, and I ended up with only eighteen cakes instead of 24. The outside of the paper also seemed to get burnt a little bit. I'm not sure why that happened, but they still tasted delicious! If you have a mini muffin pan, it would be worth it to try it in that size. I used apricot preserves as a topping, but cheesecake is complimented by any fruit, chocolate, caramel, and of course just plain as it is!