Cheesecake Cupcakes

The theme for this week is to use up as much of the house warming party leftover food as possible.  It takes some creative repurposing so we'll see what I come up with.  The first item that I made tonight were Cheesecake Cupcakes to get rid of some of those nilla wafers that we had leftover from the chocolate fountain (which, omg was awesome!). 

The recipe comes from a site that I discovered during my engineering days at UC.  If you look at the original recipe, the formatting for the instructions is a little different than a traditional cookbook but makes so much sense and takes up so little room.

Cheesecake Cupcakes
(Source: Cooking for Engineers)
Serves 12

Ingredients

• 1 lb cream cheese, softened
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 c sugar
• 12 vanilla wafer cookies (such as Nilla Wafers)
• topping of choice - cherry pie filling, strawberry pie filling, blueberry pie filling, mandarin oranges, chocolate kisses or chips, nuts, etc...choose your poison ;)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Line a muffin tin with aluminum foil muffin cups.
3. Place a vanilla wafer cookie in the bottom of each cup.
4. In a mixing bowl, cream together cream cheese, sugar, vanilla and eggs.  Let rest and disperse air bubbles by tapping mixture.  (This will prevent the cake from "falling" after you remove it from the oven.)
5. Fill cups about 3/4 full with cream cheese mixture.
6. Top with topping then bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.
7. Take out of oven and remove cups from pan.  Place on a cooling rack until completely cooled then transfer to refrigerator.  Refrigerate until ready to serve.