Cookies and Cream Mini Cheesecakes

Cookies and Cream Mini Cheesecakes
From Martha Stewart's Cupcakes
Makes 30

42 cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, such as Oreos, 30 left whole and 12 coarsely chopped
2 pounds cream cheese, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, room temperature, lightly beaten
1 cup sour cream
Pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 275F. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Place 1 whole cookie in the bottom of each lined cup.

2. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat cream cheese until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Gradually add sugar, and beat until combined. Beat in vanilla.

3. Drizzle eggs, at bit at a time, beating to combine and scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in sour cream and salt. Stir in chopped cookies by hand.

4. Divide batter evenly among cookie filled cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until filling is set, about 22 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate (in tins) at least 4 hours (or up to overnight). Remove from tins just before serving.

Note: I topped my mini cheesecakes with a swirl of whipped cream and a mini Oreo cookie. You could also crumble up a couple regular sized cookies and sprinkle the crumbs on top of the whipped cream as well.

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Do you ever wish you could go back in time to a younger age? A time with less responsibilities and stress? Even if only for a weekend? I know I do. All the time. This past week, I got my wish. For three days, I was 17 again. My best friend, Dani (she's the one on the left), came back to visit for a few days after moving to Texas over a year ago. It was a weekend full of sleepovers, movies, junk food, and of course baked goods. The first thing she said to me after she booked her flight was, "So you're making cheesecake, right?" How could I say no?

I've known Dani since elementary school, and we, along with our other best friend, Kelli (in the middle above), were inseparable from high school on. We've done everything together: from concerts to camping trips, road trips, and vacations. We spent 16 terrifying hours together on a Greyhound bus to Virginia Beach, and got robbed in the parking lot of a casino in Mississippi. We've been to auditions for American Idol in both Cleveland and Memphis, (Dani auditioned. I was moral support.) and let me tell you--sleeping in the Browns Stadium overnight is not the most pleasant thing in the world. But it was one hell of an experience. The three of us, we're practically family. I call their parents Mom and Dad, and I feel more at home in their houses than I do in mine half the time. We don't even hesitate to just walk in to each others homes and head straight for the fridge for a snack. And our Christmas/New Year's celebration tradition? We put Santa to shame with our gift giving. It takes hours to open all our gifts. Seriously. I spend more on them than anyone in my family. And it's a tradition reserved only for us. No one else is allowed to partake. No boyfriends, no family. No one. And none of us see anything wrong with that. Through the years, there have been good times and bad, but no matter what, there's always been us.

With Dani coming to visit, and specifically requesting cheesecake, I finally had the perfect reason to try the Cookies and Cream Mini Cheesecakes from the Martha Stewart Cupcake book. I had toyed with the idea of making these a couple weeks ago, but that plan fell through when I accidentally ate most of the package of Oreos before I even bought the rest of the ingredients. Not sure how that happened.... I swear I only took like 1 or 2, and suddenly, the package was empty. But I wouldn't let myself do it this time! This package was to bake with! Okay, maybe I cheated a little and had 1 or 2, but that's all!

The recipe was so easy to put together. I made them on Saturday so they would be ready when the girls came over on Sunday. The actual making of the cheesecake took under an hour from start to finish, but then they had to cool overnight, so I didn't get to test them out right away. That's the only thing I don't like about cheesecake. There's no instant gratification with it. But the rest I'm perfectly okay with. We had these as dessert after dinner--our usual pasta, while we watched movies (the very appropriate 13 Going On 30, about a 30 year old that still thinks she's 13) and attempted to play board games. The girls seemed to like them (they had seconds, and maybe even thirds), and I sent an entire cupcake tray back to Kelli's with them the next afternoon. By the time I rejoined the party after work that night, the whole thing was gone, so I guess they were a hit with everyone!

We spent the rest of the weekend doing exactly what we would have been doing 10 years ago--sleeping over at Kelli's, stuffing ourselves full of junk food, staying up all night, and watching hours and hours of Backstreet Boys videos. Seriously. We watched like 5 hours of BSB on Tuesday night alone. And we still had more to watch, but it was already 5 o'clock in the morning, and we had to take Dani back to the airport by noon! So much may have changed in our lives, but for those 3 nights, we forgot all about the stress of our lives, and we were 17 again.