Sweet Tooth

Sometimes you need something sweet in your life.  I think this is something to live by.  As much as I love to cook and prepare healthy dinners, snacks and food for my family I think you have to keep everything in balance and throw in a sweet touch then and again.  Everything in moderation. 

In my family we have a monthly family dinner.  Usually we all pitch in with the food and this past week I choose the dessert option.  I wanted to do something more on the playful side so I chose to make Mini Reese's Cheesecake Bites. 

I chose to do a chocolate graham cracker crust since I could play off the chocolate and peanut butter flavors of a Reese's.  I gathered my ingredients, (and my men: my fiance and my son and recruited them into helpers!) and then I gave the boys a project that only they could do best.  Crush the graham crackers.  

I started off with melted unsalted butter.  I placed that in a Pyrex microwavable bowl and melted it completely.

Once we had that ready, we added the crushed graham crackers in batches because we wanted just the right consistency to make for a perfect crust for our cheesecake bites.  Adding in batches like this allowed me to keep an eye on how it was setting up - it worked out perfectly. 

Keep mixing until you can push some of the mixture up the sides of the bowl and it stays in place.  Once that was set, we moved on to the cheesecake. 

Now, I will say, by all means - cheesecake is super easy to make on your own, however, I knew that I was going to take a store short-cut here and simply bought the pre-made Philly cheesecake mix. 

We put the filling in another bowl and added the Reese's chips to to and combined together.  Now we were ready for our assembly line.  My son had the job of lining up the baking cups - this is what we were going to put our bites in. 

Once he had our cups lined up, we began spooning in our crust.  Just a spoonful in the bottom, then we spread it out so that it covered the bottom of the cup. 

Once our crust was in, came the good stuff - the filling!!!  We spooned that in until the cups were about 3/4 of the way full. 

I will say at this point there was silence as everyone waited to lick the spoons.  It was a quiet moment.  A very short, quiet moment.  Of course next it was time to add the toppings.  We had different sets of cheesecake bites: one for adults and one for the kids.

One batch held the topping of more Reese's chips and the other was a little more indulgent.  Chocolate covered coffee beans.  We topped them all, then for an added touch we shaved some chocolate over all of them.

  To allow them to set, we placed them in the freezer for 3 hours.  Once set up they were perfect.  For quality control purposes only, we took one out and cut into 3 pieces.  It passed our quality control. 

These mini cheesecake bites were a huge hit at our family dinner ... I'm already thinking I may do another dessert next month .... hmmmm......

Cheers!