Hello my beautiful recipe geniuses, and welcome back to another salty-sweet edition of Recipe of the Week. Last week, you all shared a wealth of very impressive no-fail dishes to take to all of the many barbecues and potlucks we will no doubt be attending this summer.
The most up-voted comment and recipe was BOOZY MINI CHEESECAKES YOU GUYS, and comes to us from meep, this week's Queen of the Recipe Castle.
cookies- i like chips ahoy, oreo and gingersnaps work well too.unsalted butter1.5 packets of cream cheese.25 cup of sour cream1 egg plus one egg yolk..5 cup sugara pinch of salt +a bit of vanilla extract. a cup of whatever alcohol your heart desires.
smash the cookies into cookie dust, and mix it with 2 tbsp unsalted butter (maybe a little sugar if you like your crusts sweet). find a mini muffin pan (silicone is best) and put a tbsp of the cookie/butter thing in each up. press flat with a shot glass and bake in the oven at 350 for around 10m.
meanwhile, mix the cream cheese and sour cream along with the alcohol of your choice (baileys, kahlua, amaretto...all good options). then blend the sugar, egg, egg yolk, vanilla and salt. blend until you can blend no more. put a scoop of this mixture in each cookie-lined muffin tin thing. bake at 300 for 20ish minutes. let cool before serving. be the envy of all your friends. you can also drizzle with chocolate or something if you want to get fancy.
I'm a bit of a cheesecake purist; I don't like a lot of toppings or mix-ins or fruit or any of that noise. But ethanol? That's a mix-in I can get behind. I chose Kahlua, because it is delicious and fairly well-priced.
For the crust, I went with Pecan Sandies, because I love them and I thought their crumbly salty goodness would provide a bit of balance to the decadent rich and boozy filling. (And because I was a little tired of Oreos, but shhhh don't tell.) I crushed up ten Sandies and mixed the crumbs with two tablespoons of butter. I then pressed a tablespoon of the the buttery cookie mixture into each of the (lined) mini muffin cups, with the suggested shot glass, which worked perfectly.
I think my mini muffin tin is especially mini because I had a rather thick crust on my cheesecakes -- much thicker than the crust in the Pinterest photo -- but I'm not angry about it in the slightest. After mixing the remaining ingredients and spooning it over my parbaked crusts I baked the little bastards at 300 for 18 minutes, until they were still a bit jiggly in the middle and a slightly shiny on the top.
Then I went to yoga.
When I got back I put them in the fridge to chill and set (about fifteen minutes) and then proceeded to eat five of them, which is definitely what my yoga instructor meant when she said "be sure to drink a lot of fluids." (I mean, this cheesecake is FULL of Kahlua, which -- last time I checked -- is a fluid. CHECK AND MATE.)
I am now faced with quite the dilemma. I have about twenty more of these delicious little buggers chilling in my fridge, and it is taking my entire reserve of will power to not eat every single one in rapid succession. The husband is no help -- his sweet tooth is broken -- and I can't exactly foist them upon the teenage neighbors because I'm not convinced that an appreciable amount of the ethanol baked out of these babies. (Thanks azeotropes!) Oh well. I guess I'll just have to handle this one by myself.
HUGE thanks to meep for providing this recipe; it is outstanding and you should take boozey mini cheesecakes to every party you attend. Meep's tropy is "Without Permission" by The National, because it perfectly captures how I will feel when these little treasures are all gone:
Next topic!
As you may have noticed, I've kind of been into bread recently.
I mean really, is there anything better than homemade bread, fresh from the oven, slathered in butter or maybe homemade ricotta if you're fancy? I enjoy this no-knead recipe, but I want to branch out. I need to do it quickly though, as it will soon be too warm for such activities. So quick my lovelies! Give me your favorite bread recipes posthaste! The only requirement is that they don't require a bread machine, because I don't have one of those.