Taco Tuesday: Mini Toffee Cheesecakes

Yum!

These are simple.  They taste like "real" cheesecake (not the jello no bake kind).  They cook faster, and they are so easy to serve to a crowd or take on a picnic.  I always get creative with "add-ins" on these.  But my favorite is toffee bits.  When I was student teaching, one of the parents made these often, and put them in the teacher's lounge. God bless her!

When we were at the bible school in Wisconsin, I made these all the time.  I hadn't made them in a really long time, and after many requests from Doug and his new buddy Dean, I decided to make some.  Terrible idea, I'm gonna way 500 lbs.

With the amounts I've included you'll get 18-20 mini cheesecakes, depending on how full you fill them. This recipe is SO easy to make less or more of! When I was making these all the time, I always figured I'd get 6-8 per package of cream cheese, and for each package of cream cheese I'd use 1/3 cup of sugar (or so), and one egg.  Just multiply those amounts, add some vanilla, and whatever candy/cookie add in you want and you're good to go.



Ingredients:

2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese (room temperature)
2 eggs
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 bag toffee bits
18-20 Nilla wafers
18-20 muffin liners

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Put one Nilla wafer in the bottom of each muffin liner.  Beat together cream cheese, eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Stir in toffee bits (or add-in(s) of your choice, nuts, crunched up cookies, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, snickers chunks).  Bake for 13-18 minutes.  Usually 15 minutes is perfect, but ovens vary, so I'd say check them after 10 minutes and go from there.  You want them to be JUST set, not too jiggly, but not getting brown on top either.  Let cool.  Refrigerate.

These are not very yummy fresh from the oven or before they are refrigerated. Doug cheats every time, and then admits they are much better if you wait. So try your hardest.

If you want to make these gluten free, they hold together just fine without a cookie at the bottom, it's just crustless and still delicious.  If you want a chocolate crust, you could easily use one side of an Oreo.  I'm thinking about using oreos next time, the cream halves I'll throw in the chopper, and the non-cream half I'll use as the crust.