Gingerbread Cheesecake Bites

My name is Sandie and I'm a pintrest-a-holic.  I can't believe how quickly I have become addicted to pinterest.com. It's the greatest website ever! Thanks to pinterest I was able to have four family friendly, low-cost, but meaningful, crafts at my special event at work on Friday night. We had approximately 500 participants at our Candy Cane Lane and not one of them had to do a cheesy Oriental Trading craft.

Also thanks to pinterest, I currently have about 25 cookies on my to-do list for Christmas, which is about 10 too many. I'm doing a couple short cuts this year- for example, I bought refrigerated peanut butter cookie dough for my peanut butter blossoms and I made the cake balls a few weeks in advance knowing how crazy I'd be.  So here is my first cookie of the day... Gingerbread Cheesecake bites. They aren't as pretty as the picture I saw on pinterest, but they are good! I tweaked the recipe listed here. I really love my homemade gingerbread, so I used that instead of the store bought and I doubled the cream cheese to make it a little more like cheesecake. I hope you enjoy it!


Gingerbread Cheesecake Bites

1 3.5o cook & serve butterscotch pudding mix
1/2 C butter
1/2 C brown sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 C flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
8oz room temperature cream cheese
2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Cream dry pudding mix, butter and brown sugar until smooth. Add unbeaten egg. Combine dry ingredients. Add to pudding mixture. Chill 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350. Roll dough into a ball and place into line mini-muffin pan. Use the end of a rolling pin (I used a fondant roller) to make a well in the ball.

Beat cream cheese until smooth. Add powdered sugar and vanilla. Put in piping bag and pipe into gingerbread wells.

Bake 9 minutes.  Let cool.