Cherry Mini Cheesecakes

Holiday time means lots of parties and baking.  I needed something to bring to a mom's night out.  Chocolate seemed to be pretty well covered already.  My son had been asking for cherry pie, so I had cherries on hand and some low fat cream cheese.  I sought out a recipe for cherry cheese cake.

I found a nice low fat cheese cake recipe, but did keep looking a bit for mini recipe for baking instructions.  I did use her crumb mixture for the crust.  It calls for 1 cup of each flour, oats, and brown sugar and a 1/2 cup of melted butter.  It yielded a lot.  I could fill 72 mini muffin cups and still had some left over.

For the cheese cake, I used this recipe, but made some modifications.
First I made it up for one block of low fat cream cheese and then after buying 2 more, made a double recipe.  I needed it all!  The double recipe with two 8oz blocks of cream cheese yielded 24 pretty full mini muffin cups.
For 2 blocks:
2 8 oz blocks of low fat cream cheese softened
1/2 cup of sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp of vanilla
1 TB of lemon juice


I have a hard time with the bright red cherries in the cherry pie filling.  So I purchased canned Oregon Red Tart Cherries packed in water and followed their instructions for making pie filling.  It was very easy and thickened like magic.

Due to my exceptionally large yield of mini cheese cakes, I only brought 1/3 or so and froze the rest.  I froze the cheesecakes without topping which left me with extra cherry pie filling.