Everyone loves cheesecake...right?

My mom recently had a Christmas party for her friends from work, and guess who was recruited to help with the food?

Well my main responsibility was desserts, so I decided to make one of my personal favorites, cheesecake. I didn't make my usual recipe, however. This time I wanted to make cheesecake bites, even though my mom wanted me to make a pumpkin spice cheesecake.

I decided to please both of us and went ahead and made cheesecake bites in three different flavors, one of which was pumpkin. The other two flavors I decided on were chocolate with an Oreo crust and raspberry swirl with a graham cracker crust.

I used a base recipe that I found online, which I will provide, and just separated it into thirds before creating each flavor. I bought a pack of disposable cake pans (it conveniently came with three pans) that were short in height. After they finished baking I simply cut the cakes into tiny, bite-size squares. Although the squares weren't as pretty as I wanted them to be, the flavor definitely made up for it.



Cheesecake Bites (base adapted from Peggy Epstein's contribution to ehow.com)

6 8-oz. packages cream cheese, softened

6 large eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

Mix all of these ingredients together and you have your base to work with.

For the pumpkin flavor I used about half of a 15 0z can of pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and ground cloves. I just mixed it all into the cheesecake base with my mixer. For the crust I ground a sleeve of graham crackers in my food processor and added about 4-6 Tbsp. of melted butter, and a bit of cinnamon and brown sugar.

For the raspberry swirl, all I added to the base was about 1/2 tsp. vanilla. For the crust, I once again used my food processor to grind up a sleeve of graham crackers, but this time all I added was the melted butter. For the raspberry sauce I pureed a package of fresh raspberries and strained it through a sieve to collect the seeds. After I poured the cheesecake batter into the crust, I poured the raspberry sauce on top in straight lines across the cake and used a toothpick to create a swirl effect.

Lastly, for the chocolate cheesecake I melted 6 oz of chocolate chips and 2 Tbsp. of butter in a double-boiler and used my mixer to incorporate it into the batter. The tip here is to take a little of the batter and mix it in with the chocolate before you add it to the rest of the batter. This way it cools the chocolate down a little bit before you mix it in. For the crust I ground up about half of a package of Oreos and added melted butter to that as well.

I then cooked the cakes in a 325 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. Another key thing to remember is that after the cakes bake, you need to let them cool in the OFF oven, with the door cracked open for another 20 minutes. This prevents the cheesecake from cracking on the top. This is a necessity when making ANY kind of cheesecake, not just bites.

After cooling in the refrigerator overnight, voila! I had a delicious and easy to eat dessert perfect for a party.