Good Eating Monday: Sopapilla Cheesecake Pie!

We've had a drizzling rain going on since last night---the remnants of that Pacific Hurricane, Patricia, but it's  mostly cleared off except for a cool gusty breeze. We haven't had a soaking rain for many weeks and this will be really good for my winter veggie garden!

A rainy day is also a good day for inside projects and I've been working on re-chaulking the seams on my various vinyl counter tops, which also involves a good cleaning with diluted bleach-water plus baking soda to remove stains, then a polish with a no-buff kind of car polish. (Yup, that's one of my life-hacks for keeping vinyl counter tops looking good. The polish doesn't make the counter shiny, so much as it fills the scratches and makes it stain resistant.)
The kitchen counter is done. Today was the master bath.

Today's Good Eating treat is a recipe I got from my friend, Jacqui in Pensacola when we visited last weekend called, "Sopapilla Cheesecake Pie."  

It's also called "Mexican Cheesecake" and it's DELICIOUS!

Mexican Cheesecake/Sopapilla Cheesecake 

It's really a bar-cookie that has  a cheesecake layer sandwiched between 2 Crescent Roll dough crusts.

Pillsbury now makes Crescent Roll dough that isn't perforated specifically for baking and I bought 2 of those for my crusts. 

Sopapilla Cheesecake Pie

Ingredients:

3 (8oz) packages of cream cheese, softened. (reg or light)

1 1/2 cups sugar (granulated or Splenda)

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

2 packages Crescent Rolls

1/2 cup melted butter, melted (reg or light butter or margarine)

1/4 to 1/ 3 cup sliced almonds 

1/2 cup sugar (can reduce to 1/4 cup for less sweet)

1 Tablespoon ground Cinnamon

Honey to drizzle over top crust after baking.

Optional: either chopped pecans or chocolate chips.

Directions:

1)  Preheat oven to 350 and oil spray a 9 x 13 baking pan.

2)  Prepare filling: beat softened cream cheese, sugar, vanilla & whole egg until creamy, then set aside. If you want to add a handful of chocolate chips, stir them into the filling. Or, if you prefer, a handful of chopped pecans. (Adding them to the filling works better.)

3) Prepare first crust layer: Open and gently unroll one Crescent Roll out flat on a lightly floured surface. Using a floured rolling pin, roll the crust up on the rolling pin to place in pan, carefully unrolling it into pan bottom, then bake this crust for 5 minutes. (This trick with the rolling pin keeps the dough from stretching out.) 

4)  Filling: Once crust has been baked 5 minutes, remove from oven and spread with the cream cheese mixture over crust to evenly to walls of pan. 

5)  Prepare second crust layer: Just like the first layer, carefully unroll the Crescent Roll dough, then re-roll it up on a floured rolling pin and unroll it over top of cream cheese.

6)  Topping: Drizzle melted butter over top, then combine 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar with 1 Tablespoon cinnamon and sprinkle that over top of butter. If desired, sprinkle with sliced almonds.

7)  Bake: Bake 45 minutes. Remove from oven and drizzle with honey over top.  Cool & cut into 24 squares. (I cut mine a bit smaller, into 32 so they'd go further.)

*****
I directions on my card are shorter, but here I wrote them out more extensively for clarity. The dessert goes to get quite quickly.

I lesson the calorie load, I did opt for light cream cheese & Splenda in my filling and also just used the cinnamon & sugar shaker I always have on hand to sprinkle the top with.
I have quite a few cheesecake aficionado's among the Airmen at our base Bible study and they loved this!

This is such a fantastic recipe, it's going into our Christmas newsletter this year as "best recipe of the year!"

*****

Eat up, me hearties, yo-ho!