Caramel Apple Cheesecake Bars

Expect a lot of apple recipes over the next few weeks because we went apple picking and now I have an overabundance of apples. I've had this recipe pinned to my Pinterest board for a long time so I was really excited to be able to put this together. This recipe will take a little bit of time because there are a lot of steps, but the results are so worth it!

This comes from Key Ingredient.

Ingredients:

Crust:

-2 cups all-purpose flour

-½ cup firmly packed brown sugar

-1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

Cheesecake Filling:

-3 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

-¾ cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons, divided

-3 large eggs

-1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Apples:

-3 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and finely chopped

-½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

-¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

Streusel Topping:

-1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

-1 cup all-purpose flour

-½ cup quick cooking oats

-½ cup (1 stick) butter, softened

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a medium bowl, combine flour and brown sugar. Mix with your hands until the mixture is crumbly. Press evenly into a 9x13 baking pan sprayed well with cooking spray. Bake 15 minutes.

While the crust is baking in the bowl of your stand mixer beat the cream cheese with 3/4 cup sugar in an electric mixer at medium speed until smooth. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, then the vanilla. Stir to combine.

Pour the filling over the warm crust.

In a small bowl, stir together chopped apples, remaining 2 tablespoons sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Spoon evenly over cream cheese mixture. 

Sprinkle evenly with Streusel topping. Bake 40-45 minutes, or until filling is set. 

Drizzle with caramel topping and let cool. 

Enjoy.

This made a lot of cheesecake so I gave some pieces to friends. Boyfriends were insisting that their girlfriend get the recipe. Even though there is a lot of cook time, this recipe is worth it. The crust was really good, the brown sugar was flavor was detectable. The apple topping and Streusel topping made for a good sweet and crunchy combination. This is good with or without the caramel drizzle on top.

Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries

This great dessert recipe was kind of like strawberry cheesecake inside out. Last summer we made chocolate covered strawberry shots which were really great, also with hollowed out strawberries. So this time we put cheesecake filling inside the strawberries, and melted chocolate on top, which worked out really great. The original recipe idea comes from Make It & Love It.

Ingredients:

-1 package strawberries
-8 oz cream cheese
-1/2 cup powdered sugar
-1 tsp vanilla
-chocolate to melt
-graham crackers

Cut out the middle of the strawberries. Beat together the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla.

Fill a plastic bag with the cream cheese mixture and cut out the corner.

Fill the hollowed out strawberries.

Once all the strawberries are filled, dip the tops of the strawberries
into the crushed up graham crackers.

Melt the chocolate. Use a fork to drizzle the chocolate
on top of the strawberries.

These were really good, I'll probably make them again some time. The graham cracker really made it like a cheesecake crust on these. The more I look at these the more I want to make them again soon, they were really tasty.

Cookie Dough Cheesecake

I like all of my meals to end with dessert especially if I also made an effort to make a cocktail to serve with dinner like in this series of four blogs (Cake Batter Martinis, Pesto Crostinis, Cheese and Onion Pie and now this one) so here is an easy dessert to finish off a great dinner. You can find the original recipe here.


Ingredients: 
- 2 pkg. (8 oz. each) Philadelphia Cream Cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 tsp. vanilla
- 2 eggs
- 3/4 cup prepared or refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough, divided
- 1 Honey Maid Graham Pie Crust (6 oz.)

Preheat oven to 350.

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla in a bowl with an electric mixer (I know I'm not using one, I'll get to that later).

Add eggs and mix until blended.

Pour the batter into the crust and drop spoonfuls of cookie dough on top. 

Bake for forty minutes. Cool and refrigerate for three hours...or you can freeze the cheese cake for half of The Hunger Games movie...I'm guess that was so about an hour and a half. Serve. This cheese cake was good and would pair really well with the cake batter martini, but I cannot stress enough how important an electric mixer is -- man power won't cut it on this one.