Share Your Sweets: Fruit

The theme for this week's Share Your Sweets on Serious Eats is fruit. It just so happened that one of my very good friends was celebrating her birthday this weekend (happy birthday Kristen!) and I was going to attend her birthday party. I offered to bring something sweet and managed to  incorporate fruit into her tasty birthday treats. I know she loves lime so, after much back and forth, I decided to depart a little bit from my typical cupcake and I made mini lime cheesecakes with sour cream and raspberries. 

I started off with this recipe for key lime cheesecake pie from Kraft Canada. I kind of merged it with this recipe for coconut cream mini cheesecakes from the same site. They were my inspiration for the individual portions, sour cream topping, and I used it to figure out the baking time for the scaled down size. All in all the whole process was pretty simple. I started off with the crust (obviously). I had some ginger cookies kicking around in the cupboard so I threw some in the mini processor and added the cookie to replace about half of the graham crumbs in the crust. The recipe was very simple - 1 1/2 cups of cookie crumbs and 1/4 cup of melted butter. One slight mistake I made was adding 1/4 cup butter, melted instead of 1/4 cup of melted butter. Sounds minor but the mix came out a bit greasier than I would have anticipated.

One tablespoon of crumbs went into each cup. I portioned it out into 24 cups but I ended up only having enough filling for 20. If I were to make these again I would reduce to 18 cheesecakes and have a little more crust and filling for each one. I also doubled the amount of lime zest and juice that went into the batter. I generally find citrus recipes don't include enough to really be able to taste it so I always increase the amounts.

Out of the oven

The finished product

When I first tried one of these, I thought it was still a bit too tangy so I doubled the amount of sugar in the rest of the sour cream. I thought it helped a bit without making the dessert overly sweet. I thought they were quite delicious. Everyone at the party seemed to enjoy them. I would definitely make some other variation of these again. A good number of portions with minimal ingredients and they look great on the plate!

Are you a cheesecake fan? If so, what's your favorite flavor? If not, why?