Eats - Cheesecake In A Jar

Hello! I have a small family, so there's no sense in making a dessert unless all three of us will eat it - unless I can find a small-scale recipe, that is. 

Case in point: cheesecake. My husband doesn't like it, but our daughter and I do. I suppose I could have just scaled down a cheesecake recipe for the two of us, but never bothered to do so. 

Then awhile back I came across a recipe for Cheesecake In A Jar from the King Arthur Flour website. Their recipes are usually pretty good so I took notice of this one, in which seven 1/2 pint canning jars are filled with a cheesecake mixture, then baked in a slow cooker. 

I didn't have any canning jars around at the time, but before I could find them in thrift stores (they often show up there), a friend asked me if I wanted some old canning jars that had been her mother's. Problem solved! 

The King Arthur recipe states that it makes 14 rich servings (two per jar), so I cut the recipe in half and used four jars. The instructions are written for using an electric mixer, but since I was making a half recipe, I beat the mixture by hand, making sure that the cream cheese was well-softened before I began. 

The cooking time is between one-two hours in the slow cooker, and the instructions caution that cooking times may vary. I cooked our cheesecakes for around two hours (they definitely weren't done at the one-hour mark), but I think I could have shortened the time a bit. 

I found it convenient to make these after dinner last night, then I refrigerated them to have for dessert tonight. 

Here's how a jar looked before it was opened:

And here's about a quarter of the cheesecake scooped out for my serving:

Result? Tastes good, like a cheesecake should!

You may have noticed that there are two layers of graham cracker crumbs in the jar - I should mention that the recipe instructions say to add the crumbs as one bottom layer, but one commenter complained that it was too hard to get to the crumbs when spooning the cheesecake out. She said she was going to try layering the crumbs next time. That made sense to me, so that's what I did.

Would I make these again? Well, even with a half recipe, these are still pretty rich for two cheesecake eaters, but this dessert would be fun to serve at a party or to give as small gifts (they keep up to a week). 

If you'd like the recipe, you can find it HERE.