Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes

Yesterday was a VERY special person's Birthday. This person loves food, friends, trashy VH1 reality TV shows, drinks, cooking, True Blood, Olsen Twin movies, Chelsea Handler, shopping, shoes and most of all: cheese. Have you guessed who it is, yet? My lovely, but absent, co-blogger Spice!

Seriously, this girl loves cheese. So for her Birthday, to thank her for being born the awesome person she is, I made her Macaroni and Cheese and Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes. The macaroni and cheese was heavenly, but this post is about the Cheesecake. =)

Spice didn't want a whole cheesecake that she had to eat, so she asked for individual cheesecake cupcakes. This recipe, however, made 30. So we now have a plethora of these guys taking over our fridge! AHHH! Cheesecake invasion!

Just kidding. I'm sure they will be gone by the time I get home tonight.

Everyone who loves cheesecake thought these were fantastic. And who doesn't like Oreos?! I must say they were very easy to make, too. You ground some Oreo's, put them in the cream cheese and you shake 'em all about!



Or something along those lines.

The only issue I ran into was that the recipe said to keep the cheesecakes in the muffin tins until you serve them. I only have 2 muffin tins, though. I just made sure that they were completely cooled before I removed them and immediately transfered them to the refrigerator and they were fine.



The Oreo at the bottom of each cupcake got a cheer from every eater. I was afraid they would get soggy sitting on the bottom of all that cream cheese, but several days later, the Oreo's were still crunchy!

Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes from Martha Stewart's Cupcake Book

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

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

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.

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

Divide batter evenly among cookie-lined cups, filling each almost to the top. Bake, rotating pan halfway through, until filling is set, about 22 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or up to overnight). Remove from tins just before serving (or take them out after they are cooled like I did).