Bake 52: Light New York Cheesecake (individual size)

If you haven't already guessed, when it comes to baking and desserts, I am more of a go-big-or-go-home-kind-of-person.  I don't bake "light" very often.  I would rather eat a smaller amount of a regular dessert (that's what I tell myself when I am making it anyway) or just not have dessert at all (this is the lesser chosen of the two options).  With that in mind, I will have you know I thought the cheesecake was pretty good!

 I talked to Clare earlier in the week and we were expressing our concern for having a whole cheesecake sitting around in our small households-hers being even smaller than mine.  We decided we could half the recipe and make it in custard dishes.  In hindsight, I wish I would have thirded (is that a word?) the recipe since there are 3 eggs and we still didn't need quite half.  My custard dishes probably didn't need to be quite that full and since I halved it, I was shoving 6 servings into 4 dishes.  Yeah, not a very well thought out plan.    I did like that it made for less time in the oven and less time cooling than a regular sized cheesecake.

The taste test:  It really tasted way better than I was expecting, it was good!  Tyler said he liked the regular cheesecake base a lot better.  I wonder if I should have told him it was "light" before he ate it though.  I think he went into it being bias toward the poor cheesecake.  The kids also liked it so he was kind of the odd man out.  It made me wonder what the caloric difference was between the two though and I did some number crunching.  60 calories.   I am not sure that's enough of a difference for me, but this one also has less fat, saturated fat, more protein, blah, blah, blah.  Oh and I also made the chocolate swirl variation (why wouldn't I?) in the book, so that added a few calories too.  Oops. 

Talesha was our host this week and chose the recipe, for the full recipe you can visit her blog (HERE). Thanks for hosting this week, Talesha, and for picking something I wouldn't normally pick!  I think that's one of the great things about our group, it makes me bake things out of my comfort zone.  I even learned a new thing this week.  I had no idea what yogurt cheese was, but now I know!

Graham cracker crust

Into the little custard dishes and push down.  I found a little measuring cup that was a great size to do the pushing.

According to the recipe, you process the cottage cheese until smooth and at this point I was wondering if it was supposed to be smoother than this.

When I got everything else in, I wasn't worried anymore, lots smoother!

For the chocolate variation, you take 1 cup of the mixture and add 2 T cocoa powder, 2 T sugar and 1 T vanilla.  (I halved that since I also halved the recipe)

I had planned to serve them in this container but since they weren't very pretty (around the edges of the dish) I took them out. (I forgot to spray the dish like the recipe indicated)

Tyler got raspberries since they are his favorite.  Since we were dealing with "healthy" I didn't want to add a bunch of sugar and make a syrup or anything so I just dusted the fruit with a little.

The rest of us had strawberry.

The inside.

Oh, and I think I am going to try to incorporate hearts into every post until V-day. :)

I am loving our baking group!  If you want to know more about it you can check out the Bake 52 page at the top.

And this little deal is supposed to help you see everyone who participated this week