Mini Passionfruit Cheesecakes
My friend Haley didn’t like cheesecake. That is, until she tried these.
The recipe
Yield: 12 mini cheesecakes
Time: 1 hour 20 mins, plus a few hours of cooling time
Ingredients
Crust:
1 c (100 g) graham crackers, crushed
2 tbsp (24 g) sugar
2 tbsp (28 g) salted butter
Cheesecakes:
10 oz (285 g) cream cheese, at room temperature
½ c (107 g) sugar
3 tbsp (55 g) sour cream, at room temperature
⅓ c (90 g) heavy cream, at room temperature
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
½ c (70 g) passionfruit juice, at room temperature
2 eggs, at room temperature
Passionfruit glaze:
1 c (140 g) passionfruit juice
5 tbsp (60 g) sugar
1 tbsp cornstarch
Instructions
Crusts:
1. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Line a muffin pan with cupcake wrappers.
2. Mix the crushed graham crackers and the sugar in a bowl with a fork.
3. Melt the butter in the microwave, then pour it into the crushed cookie mixture and stir until totally combined and it has the texture of wet sand. Place a little over 1 tbsp in each cupcake wrapper and pack it down firmly with your fingers.
4. Bake the crusts 16 minutes, until they’re crisp and set and golden brown. Turn the oven temperature down to 250°F. Crack the door for a few minutes to cool it off.
Cheesecakes:
5. When the crusts are almost cool, beat the cream cheese on medium speed in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until it’s light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the sugar then beat again until it’s smooth and well combined, another 3–5 minutes. Stop and scrape down the bowl a few times while mixing.
6. Add the sour cream and mix on low speed until well combined, scraping the bowl once or twice.
7. Add the heavy cream and vanilla extract and mix on low speed until combined.
8. Add the passionfruit juice in three additions, scraping down the mixer after each one and mixing on low speed until each addition has been incorporated before adding the next one.
9. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix again on low just until all the ingredients are combined.
10. Scoop the batter into each cupcake wrapper. They will be quite full, but this is fine as long as the batter doesn’t come above the edge of the wrapper.
11. Bake the cheesecakes for about 40 minutes. To check doneness, wiggle the pan. They shouldn’t be liquidy in the middle, but there should be a little wobble to their centers, like the wobble of jello or pudding. If you want to be extra sure they’re done, the temperature should read 160°F in the centers.
12. Turn off the oven and leave the cheesecakes in the oven with the door cracked for 1 hour. After that, take them out of the oven and leave them on the counter for 1 more hour.
Passionfruit glaze:
13. While the cheesecakes are cooling on the counter, make the glaze. Combine all ingredients in a small pot and whisk to combine. Heat on medium, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and begins to thicken. Cook for another 2–5 minutes, until the mixture is translucent and has gotten quite thick. Transfer to a heatproof bowl and let cool on the counter.
14. Once the cheesecakes are done cooling, transfer them to a container and spoon the passionfruit glaze on top. Be generous and use it all! This is where the flavor comes from. Put the cheesecakes in the fridge and let them chill for 3 hours to overnight before enjoying.
Notes and tips
I recommend a 100% pure passionfruit juice for these. If you substitute with something like Goya’s passionfruit juice cocktail, the flavor will be too subtle. I usually buy mine as frozen chunks of juice from Wegman’s.
Make sure all your ingredients are at room temperature. That means you’ll have to get them out of the fridge ahead of time and leave them on the counter for 1–3 hours depending on how warm your kitchen is. I know it’s a pain, but it’s going to give you the best results. If you do put cold ingredients in, you’re going to have to mix longer to combine them, resulting in denser cheesecakes.
Use light-colored cupcake wrappers. Darker ones could transfer their colors to the cheesecakes. (Or maybe it was just two-year-old Walmart brand cupcake wrappers that were the problem for me, and newer, higher quality ones would be just fine!)
For the crispest crust on your cheesecakes, let the crusts cool down most of the way before starting to put the cheesecake batter together. They should be all the way cool before you add the cheesecake batter to the cups.
I crack my oven door by sticking a wooden spoon in it to keep it open.
These are small and taste pretty light, so some people will definitely want to eat two of them! Keep that in mind if you’re baking for a crowd.
The story
The journey to these cheesecakes started on a trip to Hawaii. On the island of Kauai is this incredible bakery called The Right Slice. I fell in love with the mango-passionfruit pie, and my husband had three slices of passionfruit cheesecake in a single week.
For years, he’s been asking me to recreate it. I’d scoured the internet to find a recipe for him with no luck. It wasn’t until I started developing recipes myself that I realized I could finally make his dream come true.
These are not as perfect as the cheesecake from The Right Slice. That one has a crunchier crust and it doesn’t need the glaze on top because the cheesecake itself tastes decidedly like passionfruit. It took a few tries before I had added enough passionfruit flavor to the cheesecakes to satisfy my tasters. But when the flavor was right, the texture was off, and they were more like mousse than cheesecake. I could have tried boiling down the passionfruit juice until it turned into a super-concentrated syrup, but I didn’t have the time or desire to do that, and I figured neither would you.
Even still, these cheesecakes are magical. They not only converted Haley (she says you don’t feel bad and heavy after eating just one bite, and they don’t taste like straight cream cheese, her normal objections), but they also won over one of the contractors who had been working on our house. I’d offered him chocolate cake a few times and he’d politely declined. Undeterred, I kept at it until he finally said yes to a cheesecake. (Turns out cheesecake is his favorite dessert.) By the end of the week he had agreed to take home the leftovers from a test batch. And by the time he finished working here, he told me I was going to make him fat. I was extremely proud of myself.
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Making these the moment I have a kitchen 🤤😍
I love the stories about Haley and your contractor who loves cheesecake!