Sweet Potato Cheesecake

A coworker always talks about this specific cheesecake his wife always makes. It comes from sweet potato and is a combination of sweet potato pie, pecan pie and cheesecake. We had to make it!

She actually got her recipe from AllRecipes. This is the base recipe we also followed. We scaled it down to "4" and made 4 individual sized cheesecakes in 8oz ramekins.

First you chop up or crush enough graham crackers to make a little more than 1/3 cup of crumbs.

You then need to line your pan/ramekins with wax paper if you are using anything besides a spring form pan. This deterred us a bit, since it seemed a little labor intensive to line four baby ramekins individually, but it ended up taking us less than 5 minutes! We found the most awesome tips on a YouTube Video! Be sure to baste each one in melted butter before lining. This is key.

You then mix the melted butter, graham crumbs, sugar and cinnamon/nutmeg (we added this).

Evenly divide the crumb mixture between your containers, or if you are using one just spread it evenly in that pan. Use a shot class or glass cup to pound down the crumbs. Then place the ramekins in the oven for 10 minutes (see recipe).

After the sweet potatoes have baked for an hour in foil (see allrecipes) let them sit until you can handle them. The peels will then just slide off. Use a knife to help you if they don't come of easily. We used 3 small potatoes which was way two much. One large one would have been fine.

We then pureed the sweet potato with our immersion blender. If you don't own one of these you should. It can mix/blend/chop/puree anything and you can use it with any bowl/cup you want to!

It is extremely important to blend the potato until it is no longer lumpy.

Make sure your cream cheese is room temperature. If it is cold, your cheesecake will be lumpy and not mixed properly. Add that into the sweet potatoes and mix for about 15-30 seconds. Then add in the white sugar, sour cream, heavy cream and cinnamon/nutmeg/vanilla (we added these). After you mix for one minute add in your egg. Beat until smooth, but don't overbeat. As soon as there are no lumps stop beating.

Pour mixture into ramekins evenly. To do this, we used our handy dandy 3 tbsp scoop.

We shook them a little to get them to even out flat.

Place them in a water bath. Next time, we will use individual pans for each ramekin. Bake for 45-60 minutes. It ended up being 60 for us because it wasn't until then that the tester came out clean. Let stand in the opened oven for one more hour.

Two were beautiful and two cracked a bit. As they cooled the cracks closed up though so it was ok. If you are using one pan you should put the cheesecake in the fridge over night before trying to get it out of the pan and making the topping. These, however, popped right out when we pulled the wax paper up.

To make the topping, chop up the pecans and follow the recipe instructions for the brown sugar and butter. Stay with the stove at all times because our heated up too quickly and we ruined the topping our first try. After we added the cream we also added some cinnamon and nutmeg. Our finished product:

After you put the topping on, let it stay in the fridge at least 6 hours. It tasted 10 times better once it was completely chilled. Yum Yum Yum!

Oreo, Reeses and Snickerdoodle Themed Cupcakes

We went a little out of control today...it's not our fault. We were challenged last week to take 24 whole entire hours and just relax...do only the things we wanted, spend time with only people we truly love and just take some time to let ourselves reset. We've both had pretty crazy lives lately and running around constantly really wore us down. So today we spent our time doing the most delightful things. We started off with brunch at Park's Edge and then headed to our pool for about an hour to get some sun...and then we decided to bake...a lot.

We're going to be needing some tasty cupcake variations in the near future to share with friends, so we decided to practice on ourselves first. We made 3 different cupcakes:

Oreo Filled Vanilla Cupcakes with a Cream Cheese Frosting. Above is everything you would need to make these little delights. They use most of the same base ingredients and then each have one or two slight differences.

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes with a Brown Sugar Buttercream Frosting. You can make homemade snickerdoodle dough for the baby cookies and dough filling, but since we were making three different cupcakes and frostings from scratch, we decided we could cut a corner and used boxed cookie mix (doctored up a bit).

Chocolate, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough Cupcakes with a Peanut Butter Frosting. Obviously something had to satisfy our constant craving for the peanut butter/chocolate mix (:

If you want any of the recipes let us know...We did notice some things we need to fix for next time so that's why we aren't posting them up now.

For every recipe we creamed the room temperature butter and sugar together first for about 3 minutes and then we added the egg.

In a separate bowl we mixed together all of the dry ingredients called for by the specific cupcake. We then slowly alternated between adding this dry mixture and milk into the creamed sugar bowl.

After, we added in any other treats to the batter before scooping it into the 12 slot muffin pan. Like we said before, 3 tbsp. is the perfect amount of batter. We didn't, once again, listen to our own advice, and so some of our cupcakes exploded out of the cupcake liners.

After putting the batter into the cups, we added a 'hidden treat' to each one. Here are the oreo ones. In hindsight, this was not the brightest idea. The oreos were so big they didn't sink down into the cupcake batter! You'll see in the following pictures.

They also sucked the life out of the cupcakes. While they baked, all the moisture transferred from our delicious batter into these little guys. Next time we'll just use the crushed up oreos.

And here is the chocolate, peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie dough cupcakes.

These look so delicious.

Um, yum.

And this is what they looked like coming out of the oven. As you can see, the oreos just stayed on top, while the snickerdoodle and chocolate chunk peanut butter cookie dough sunk, leaving little dimples on the tops.

We then made all three frostings, loaded them into Ziploc freezer bags and let them chill in the fridge. After we cleaned up, we frosted and decorated them and they came out like this :

How cute are they? We made miniature snickerdoodle cookies and bought little oreos and reeses at the store.

From the outside...

Surprise! Oreos mixed in and a large oreo at the top.

Snickerdoodle! This was our favorite...

Hard to tell but that is snickerdoodle cookie dough in the middle!

And our reeses inspired cupcake...

Yes, that is homemade peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie dough in the middle...We'll use our favorite chocolate cake recipe next time because we like it better, but this was definitely still scrumptious!

Kahlua Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough Cupcakes

So we love, love, love to bake...well actually, one of us likes to bake & the other one likes to live with someone obsessed with baking. Either way, we thought it might be fun to share some of the delicious recipes that come out of our apartment. You might be thinking that you misread the title of this post...Kahlua Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough Cupcakes...how can a cupcake also contain cookie dough? Trust me, we found a way.

We'd been eyeing a cookie dough cupcake recipe we found on one of our favorite blogs, Kevin & Amanda. But there's really no fun in just copying a recipe so we decided to change it up a bit. Another thing to note is that we in no way desire to be 400 pounds any time soon, so we wanted to adapt a recipe to make a small quantity of cupcakes. Speaking of small quantities, we look for ways to do this all the time. One thing we do, in order to satisfy our sweets cravings, is to make up batches of our favorite cookie dough and then scoop them into 1 tbsp. sized balls and freeze them. You just scoop all the dough into the balls, place them on a cookie sheet or glass plate, put them in the freezer for about 15 minutes and then take them out and put them in a Ziploc quart sized bag. This lets us just pop 2 or 3 in our toaster oven (350 for about 8-10 minutes) whenever we are dying for some cookies...that or we just sneak into the freezer and eat the cookie dough raw...yummmm.

So anyways, we did this about a week ago with some Chocolate, Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough. We decided we wanted THIS to be the inside of our cupcake. So then we tried to think up a good combo and happened to spot our Kahlua flavored coffee...and that is how these delightful cupcakes came to be. If you follow our directions to the tee, yours should come out just as perfect as ours. From start to finish it took under an hour to make them, and we did it all from scratch:

They came out perfect! In the future we will definitely take pictures, step by step, but we honestly didn't know if these would be a disaster, so we didn't think to take pictures. Now while these are beautiful cupcakes to look at, the part that makes these a winner are what is on the inside...

Oh.my.gosh. These had to have been the best cupcakes we have ever tasted. We can't even describe the intensity and perfection of the flavors mixing together in that first bite. What you see is a Kahlua cupcake, filled with Chocolate, Chocolate Chunk cookie dough, topped with a Kahlua frosting and mini chocolate chips. Seriously to die for.

You really should try these! Especially if you like the whole chocolatey, mocha flavor (:


For the cupcakes:
6 tbsp. butter (at room temperature, soft but not melted)
1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 large egg
2/3 cup all purpose flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
a shake or two of salt
1/4 cup milk & coffee mixture
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract



For the cookie dough:
Ours actually came from brownies with an adaption on the side of the box for cookies. (Trader Joes) They also sell a similar cookie in a boxed mix from Pillsbury. Or even get creative and make yours from scratch! Make sure it's in 1 tbsp. scoops and that you freeze it at least one day before. The frozen aspect is what keeps it cookie dough while you bake the cupcakes! or else it would just turn into a cookie filled cupcake.

For the frosting:
6 tbsp. butter (at room temperature, soft but not melted)
1/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 cup powdered sugar
a shake or two of salt1/2 tbsp. coffee
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract



Now for the directions!


Cupcakes
Set your oven to 350 degrees and let it preheat. Place 6-7 cupcake liners in a metal cupcake pan. In a bowl, combine the butter and brown sugar with an electric mixer until the batter is creamy and smooth and then add in the egg. Continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir it around a few times to mix it up. Then begin to add these dry ingredients to the sugar, butter and egg while the mixer is on low. Alternate between the dry ingredients and the coffee/milk. Make sure to start with and end with dry ingredients. We brewed the coffee in our keurig on the strongest setting. We then mixed 1/2 coffee, 1/2 milk to get the 1/4 cup. After the mixture is well blended add in the vanilla and mix for another minute or two. Place 3 tbsp. of batter into each liner. This is the perfect amount. Trust us, don't put anymore and don't be generous. The bare 3 tbsp. is PERFECT. Drop a frozen cookie dough ball on the top of each batter cup and press down very slightly. Bake for 16-18 minutes. (We tried 15 at first and it wasn't enough so we would recommend 17...but everyone's ovens are different) One they are finished, let them completely cool before you try and ice them!


Icing
In a bowl using the electric mixer, combine the butter and brown sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Slowly add in the powdered sugar and continue to mix until smooth. Mix in the salt, vanilla and coffee and continue with the mixer until it looks well blended. We then take the icing and fill a Ziploc bag, press all the extra air out, and close it. Snip off the end and frost to your heart's delight! Sprinkle with chocolate chips and you're ready to head into Kahlua coma!

Cupcakes and Icing adapted from Kevin & Amanda.