Mixed Berries Cheesecake Recipe
When you’re busy with errands, parenting, and housework I know cooking a meal can be overwhelming. Enlisting the kids’ help in the kitchen is a great way to take a load off, teach them life skills, math and hopefully instill a love of food.
I secretly wish that one of my kids will turn into a master chef and decide that they want to cook all of the meals in the home. I would definitely support that. While baking is fun, cooking is cumbersome and it’s easy to lose your creativity when you’re worried about the budget as well. However, I like creating simple recipes without a lot of hassle. If I don’t have most of the ingredients or they can’t be easily found at the store, I’m not making it.
Life is complicated enough, I don’t need my meals to be as well. My daughter loves helping me in the kitchen and I want to capture those memories while she still has that love of being mother’s helper.
We decided to make a simple cheesecake because who doesn’t love cheesecake? We don’t get it often because we don’t want to buy it for $15 at our local store. It’s a luxury item and reserved for birthdays or special events. However, these were so easy to make that they could definitely serve more often, I know the kids loved them.
My kids gathered all of the ingredients and we talked about why we needed each one and their purpose. You’ll actually see in my ingredient picture that I have flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and sour cream but you actually don’t need those items for this recipe. We were actually trying to make muffins stuffed with cheesecake filling, however, the cupcake mixture was too dry. It became a consistency of a dough and I knew we were not going to be able to use it so last minute I changed it to a full cheesecake instead.
Was it a big deal? Nope, I didn’t want the kids to think it was a big deal that we made a mistake, we rolled with it and made our own creation instead so the end result is what we were happy with.
Mixed Berries Cheesecake Ingredients
- 8 oz cream cheese softened
- Smooth ricotta cheese (I used Lemon Nordica Smooth Cottage Cheese and all 4 containers)
- 3 eggs
- 1 tbsp sugar
Crust
- 3 cups crushed Oreo cookies
- 4 tbsp melted butter (I had Gay Lea unsalted butter)
Sauce
- 1 1/2 cup mixed berries
- 1/4 cup water
- 2 tbsp sugar or honey
Mixed Berries Cheesecake Directions
- Pre-heat the oven to 350F.
- Place the cookies into a Ziploc bag and crush them, the kids loved this part.
- In a large bowl, mix the softened cream cheese with the ricotta cheese to get a smooth consistency.
- Add 3 eggs and sugar and mix together.
- Combine the cookies and melted butter and mix with a fork.
- Line the muffin tins with cupcake liners then add the crushed cookies to the bottom.
- Add the cheese filling to the muffin tin about 3/4 full.
- Bake at 350F for 25 minutes.
- While it is baking, add the berries, water, and sugar to a small saucepan and simmer for 10 minutes to thicken the sauce. I had frozen berries so they took longer.
- Remove the cheesecake from the tins and cool in the fridge, I like it cold. Then when you’re ready to enjoy them add the sauce on top.
I added more water than needed so it was a bit runny but no one else cared. The kids were able to do it all on their own except for pouring the cheese mixture into the muffin tins.
Disclosure: I am part of the PTPA Brand Ambassador Program with Gay Lea and I received compensation as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.
Have you seen my Strawberry cupcakes?
