Gingerbread Cheesecake Bites- 12 Days of Cookies Day 2

For Day 2 of 12 Days of Cookies, I give you these gingerbread cheesecake bites. I have to admit that I have been planning my Christmas baking for several months now. But I saw these over at Culinary Concoctions by Peabody and I knew I needed to make them right away. I love ginger and my baking list was a little short on ginger/spice recipes so I thought this would be a good addition. Peabody’s recipe had an orange cheesecake filling, but I opted to flavor it simply with a little lemon zest.

Whenever I made a recipe that I’ve seen on another blog or on Pinterest, I pretty sure that mine won’t look as perfect as the inspiration. These cookies are fairly foolproof and the really looked great. The trick was figuring out how to make the indentations in the gingerbread dough balls. I tried a couple of different tools and finally ended up using the end of my large whisk, which made the perfect indentation. I hadn’t planned to pipe in the filling, but that ended up being easier. The indentations were pretty small so trying to fill them with a spoon or a cookie scoop was too clumsy. It seemed like it would be too much trouble, but in the end it saved time.

With the exception of the chilling time, these cookies are impressive without too much fuss. Of course, you could use store bought gingerbread cookie dough as the original recipe suggests, but the dough wasn’t too hard to make. They bake so quickly, in fact, I thought that there was no way that they could be done after 9 minutes! I had a little bit of dough and quite a lot of cream cheese filling left so I made 3 4-inch cookie tarts. These are so good and the tang of the cream cheese is perfect with the spicy gingerbread. These are certainly a winner!

3 cups flour
2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

8 ounces cream cheese
4 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
zest of 1 lemon

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, nutmeg and salt.

In a large mixer bowl beat the butter and brown sugar in large bowl until light and fluffy. Stir in the molasses, egg and vanilla; beat well. Gradually stir in the flour mixture on low until well mixed. Press dough into a thick flat disk. Wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 48 mini muffin pan with paper baking cups.

Roll two teaspoons of cookie dough into a ball for each cookie and place in the muffin pan. Make an indentation into each ball of dough.

Beat the cream cheese and powdered sugar until smooth. Stir in the vanilla and lemon zest. Place filling into a piping bag and pipe about one teaspoon of filling into the indentation in the cookies.

Bake for 9-10 minutes or until cookie tested with tooth pick comes out almost clean. Allow to cool before removing from the pan.

Recipe from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody