blueberry dessert

If you haven't seen or receive Kraft's food&family magazine, I highly recommend you check it out. I'm a bit of a recipe hound so over the past 15 years I've taken lots of different cooking/recipe mags like Gourmet, Cook's, Cooking Light, Taste of Home, etc. and enjoyed them all. I never expected when I signed up for the FREE food&family magazine years ago that a.) I would enjoy it (visually) as much as the high priced cooking mags and b.) I would make as many if not more of the recipes from it as I would any of the others. The food photography is excellent, the recipe quality is very good and each issue normally has several coupons for free stuff like salad dressing, chocolate chips, coffee or whatever. Yes there are lots of ads, but the vast majority of magazines you pay for these days are overflowing with ads, so that shouldn't worry anyone.


Yesterday I was filing away some paperwork that had gotten piled up in the kitchen and, like always, there were several recipe mags in the pile. Well, can one put a recipe mag away without first flipping through to see if anything jumps out? I don't think so. So, there I am, flipping away (when I should have just been filing) when a no-bake cheesecake-y looking dessert just jumped off the page. It was made with strawberries, but I had a frige full of perfectly plump and ripe blueberries, so I thought, "What the HECK! Let's give this a go". It took all of 15 minutes to make, from the time I abandoned my tidying up and began collecting the ingredients. And let me tell you WHAT......I've slaved over scratch blueberry cheesecake before and I don't think it was any better at all than this little 15 minute, no-bake cheesecake.

The website only has the recipes from the last three issues of the mag, so since I've got your mouth watering for blueberry cheesecake and the recipe was from the Summer 08 mag, here's how it goes:

(Recipe for 8x8 dish, double for 9x13)

6 graham crackers, crushed

3 T. butter or marg., melted

1/2 c. plus 1 T. sugar or Splenda

2 pkgs. cream cheese

1/4 c. blueberry preserves

1 c. fresh blueberries

1/2 tub Cool Whip

Mix crushed crackers, 1/8 c. sugar and butter in dish. Press to form crust. Refrigerate while making filling. Beat both bricks of cheese and 3/8 c. sugar in bowl until well blended. Add preserves, mix well. Sprinkle berries with 1 T. sugar in separate bowl or measuring cup. Mash a little with fork. Stir berries and Cool Whip into cheese mixture. Spoon over crust. Cover. Refrigerate for 3-4 hours before cutting.

DELISH!!! Recipe was written for strawberries so if that tempts your tastebuds more than blueberries, I'm sure it would be just as good!