I know what you might be thinking. Those who know me may not see me as much of a cook. I did mention in a previous post that I basically cook spaghetti every day. Those who really know me would say that I can also make a mean apple crisp, my chocolate mint banana bread is pretty awesome, and – as I learned today – cheesecake-stuffed strawberries are not beyond my capabilities.

The goggles, they do nothing.

While stumbling late one sleep-deprived night, I came upon the recipe on this blog, a recipe that the blogger had originally found on this blog. And now I pass it on to you. Trust me, it’s delicious.

Ingredients

• 2 crates of strawberries (about two pounds)
• 1 box Jell-O No Bake Real Cheesecake Dessert (comes with graham cracker crust mix – alternatively, you can buy graham crackers and make your own)
• chocolate

Of course, this list is a simplification of the necessities. I wasn’t making this dessert for any particular purpose, so I used only one crate of strawberries and halved all the other ingredients. I still had cheesecake mix and plenty of graham cracker left over.

Also, you can opt to make your own cheesecake filling. The Jell-O approach is a quick and easy option, and it turns out pretty great, but I say so having never tried it with cheesecake made from scratch.

The chocolate, actually, is optional – a culinary coup de grâce. I used regular milk chocolate chips here, but you can try other variations, such as the white chocolate used by one of the bloggers.

Process

The end product should be a hollowed out strawberry filled with cheesecake, topped with graham cracker and chocolate. The first step in the process, then, is to remove the top of each strawberry and hollow them out.

Depending on how many strawberries you’re dealing with and how big they are, this can be a bit tedious. The best instrument for hollowing them out is a thin, pointed utensil, such as a spoon or knife. The Novice Chef recommends a potato peeler. I just dug up this spoon:

There is a spoon.

There were a few casualties in the process, I will admit. Delicious, delicious casualties. Essentially, you want to get as much of the white parts on top and anything underneath them, but try not to break through the strawberry or slice through the side. Such imperfections may lead to a severe cheesecake leak, and that stuff gets messy enough as it is.

You will be left with a bunch of white strawberry chunks at the end. Of course, they are still edible. One idea I had after the fact was to take the strawberry interiors and the leftover cheesecake mix and to make mini cheesecakes with strawberry chunks inside – sort of a reverse on the original idea.

Once the strawberries have been hollowed out, prepare the cheesecake mix as directed. Rather than actually making it into a cheesecake, however, take the prepared mix and pour it into a piper bag. If you do not have a piper bag, you can substitute a plastic bag and cut off one of the corners. Next, take each hollowed out strawberry and squeeze cheesecake mix into it, overfilling them just slightly.

Thanks to my mom for her makeshift piper bag assistance.

Dip the cheesecake end of each strawberry into the graham cracker (if you are using the crust mix, I would advise adding the sugar and butter as it suggests on the box, rather than just using the mix right out of the bag).

The last step to complete these bite-sized morsels is to add the chocolate. Now, at this point I was getting a little impatient, and melted chocolate is hard enough to handle without the proper tools. Rather than drizzle fancy lines of chocolate on each strawberry, I just took a spoon and put a dollop on each one. The taste is the same, even if it isn’t as aesthetically pleasing.

Put the finished desserts in the refrigerator for about an hour, to let the cheesecake and the chocolate harden a bit. Wait patiently. Read a book or something. Don’t think about them for a while.

Sweetness in every bite.

So there you have it. These are relatively quick and easy to make, and the result is scrumptious. Each one is a little taste of strawberry cheesecake, so much so that it’s hard to eat just one at a time. I don’t normally like cheesecake, but I found them to be very tasty.

Next week’s mouseandhat topic shall be “The Curse of the Billy Goat”, submitted by Marc-André Chambers.