Mini Cherry Cheesecakes and Pecan Tassies
Mini Cherry Cheesecakes and Pecan Tassies are two of my favorite mini desserts! They make such a striking display together, don't they?
Usually, for Christmas, homemade fudge and small vanilla bean sugar cookies with white chocolate icing are included on the tray. They look so festive and gorgeous in rows on this Wilton Armetale Acanthus large oval tray. (I love Armetale metal serving pieces!)
The recipe for the cupcake-sized cheesecakes is from Paula Deen's cookbook but I found that the regular size was a little awkward to eat. Taking her recipe and using mini cupcake liners, these make perfect miniature cheesecakes. These are one or two bites of delicious.
All the flavors come together at once, like a party in your mouth! No, you can't eat just one... The other good part is that you won't have red cherry sauce or cheesecake dripping down your chin! For that reason, they are also very good for small children.
Depending on the liners, regular sized vanilla wafers or the mini vanilla wafers are used for the crust. Don't know if you have noticed, but some of the mini cupcake liners have a smaller diameter at the base. The mini wafers fit much better in these.
My personal favorite liner is made by Reynolds and is silver - Reynolds® StayBrite® Baking Cups. They look particularly shiny and pretty on display. (Did you know they have generous coupons on their website? ►Reynolds Coupons
Did I tell you how easy these are to make? They seriously take very little time to stir up and bake! When the little cheesecakes bake, they rise and then fall just a bit right in the center, making a little indentation just the right size for a cherry or two and some sauce. After cooling, they can be stored in a plastic container or a glass casserole dish covered with plastic or tin wrap in the fridge.
I usually make the cheesecake part the day or night before an event, leave them in the fridge overnight, and then add the cherries the next morning. Sometimes, one of the kids helps out with spooning the fruit into the little indentations on top of the mini cheesecakes.
The boys always request these at gatherings all year long! They look so festive in the fall and winter, for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter but they also look great for the Fourth of July events with the bright red cherries. A blueberry filling can be substituted for the cherry filling. It would be easy to make a red, white, and blue display with both cherry and the blueberry fillings.
The recipe for the pecan tassies is from a Southern Living book from several years ago. The unique part of this recipe is that the dough has cream cheese in it. The dough is much lighter and tastier than any other recipe, which I have found or tasted up to this point. In fact, I've had some that were downright clunky and the ratio of dough to filling was not good. If there is more dough than filling, the delicious filling is overpowered by the crust.
A mini tart shaper, which you can see in the picture above, works perfectly for pushing the dough down in the mini muffin cups. The mini tart shaper can be purchased from Pampered Chef for under ten bucks. As you can see, it works perfectly for cheesecake crusts, too.
For the recipes, click here ►mini cheesecake or here for the ► pecan tassies.
Once you make these tasty little morsels, you and your family won't be able to resist these mini cherry cheesecakes and pecan tassies.
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