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!

Varasano's

2171 peachtree road ne - atlanta, ga 30309

Flat, crispy pizza, flash baked for 3 minutes with a delicious sourdough crust that needs no dipping sauce to eat. That's the bottom line at Varasano's. We also just found out they started Sunday brunch, so we'll have to go back to review that as well. We decided to go around noon on a Sunday. We got seated immediately at a nice table on the patio.

We each started with their Spinach salad which has a raspberry balsamic dressing, candied pecans and gorgonzola cheese. All fresh and a perfectly balance of salty and sweet.

We decided to try two pizzas. This first one is their Nucci. It has Garlic, Olives & Emmenthaler finished with Arugula, Capicola & Herbs on top. Now it doesn't have any red sauce, but olive oil instead. It had great flavor and was easiest to eat once we folded in in half like the restaurant suggests.

And here is the Salumi. An assortment of Thinly Sliced Italian Cured Meats with Mozzarella, Tomato Sauce & Spiced Olives. Truly a man's pizza, so sinful but sooooo good.

We finished up with a mug of tiramisu. It was so rich and delicious. Just be careful! We both inhaled the cocoa powder on top and had coughing attacks!

This is a great spot to meet up with friends for a salad, sandwich, pizza or brunch. The atmosphere is relaxed and classy and the prices are very affordable. They have excellent thin oven fired pizza. Salute!

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!

CamiCakes Cupcakes

2221-B Peachtree Road - Atlanta, GA 30309

Who doesn't love cupcakes?  It seems like every time the two of us crave something sweet, we always end up wanting cupcakes.  This past weekend, we both got one of those 'cupcake cravings' and decided to search Atlanta for a delicious treat.  We didn't have to drive far before the adorable CamiCakes sign caught our eye.

The amount of people inside told us that we must have found a popular spot.  Picture this:  cute bistro tables with silver pendant lights above each one, people of all ages casually talking and eating, and a display of the most delicious looking cupcakes you've ever seen.

Every one of them looked absolutely delicious and reminded us of the kind of cupcakes you'd see on cooking shows.  The perfect frosting swirl topped with a drizzle of caramel or a cute fondant flower.  It was so difficult to only choose one, so we decided to each get a different flavor and share.

The "Mint Chocolate" cupcake had mint chocolate chips baked into a chocolate fudge batter, topped with mint buttercream and mint chocolate chips.

The "Chocolate Peanut Butter Cream" cupcake is just as rich as it sounds.  Chocolate cake topped with peanut butter cream cheese frosting, with a peanut butter and chocolate drizzle.

How tasty do these look?! 

We sat at one of the tables to enjoy our cupcakes as people continued to stroll in and out of the bakery.  It was easy to see that many people love this place, and after we tasted our cupcakes, we knew why.  Not only are they pretty - they taste amazing!

CamiCakes Cupcakes is open Monday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. and closed on Sunday.  Their incredible desserts are $2.50 each, or $28/dozen.

Make sure to go early if you have a specific cupcake in mind - they're made fresh daily and once they're gone, they're gone. To see more photos, or even order online, visit CamiCakes.com

have a yummy day <3