Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries

Since Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, I’ll get right to the point. These strawberries are juicy, creamy, sweet little bites of perfection, ready to sweep your taste buds, your friends, or your special someone right off their feet.  Of course, these would be fabulous any time of year, but Valentine’s Day always seems like a time to indulge and be decadent. These Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries give you all the decadence you could want for only 1 P+ or 35 calories each! I can’t get over how naughty these taste.

Cheesecake is one of my favorite desserts, but one slice from the bakery at my local supermarket is around 500 calories. These strawberries change up the ratio of berry to cheesecake so that you’re eating more fruit, and the berries provide the perfect vessel for portion controlled deliciousness. The graham cracker “crust” on top is the perfect finishing touch. With only 5 ingredients and no cook time, these sweet little treats are easy to whip up, and they’re so light you can indulge completely guilt-free!

Source: I have seen these all over. Here’s a few: Iowa Girl Eats, Sugar Derby and Nutmeg Nanny. All of these blogs claim to have found the idea on Pinterest, so I am not sure who the original source is anymore. If it’s you, let me know!

Ingredients:
1 lb fresh strawberries (this was about 16 large strawberries for me)
4 oz 1/3 less fat cream cheese, softened
¼ cup powdered sugar
¼ t vanilla extract
1 full sized low fat graham cracker (one sheet of four little rectangles), crushed

Directions*:
1.    Cut the tops off of each strawberry and discard. Using a paring knife, hollow out each strawberry, removing the white interior.
2.    In a mixing bowl, combine the cream cheese, powdered sugar and vanilla extract and beat with an electric mixer until thoroughly combined. At this point you can either transfer the cream cheese mixture into a piping bag and pipe it into each berry, or do what I did and just fill each berry using a butter knife.
3.    Dip each strawberry, cheesecake side down, into the graham cracker crumbs, coating the top. 

*Note: These taste best the day they are made, so if you are not planning to serve/eat all 16  in one day, I recommend making the cream cheese filling, crushing up the graham cracker, and storing them separately (the cream cheese filling in a tupperware container in the refrigerator and the crumbs in a ziplock somewhere dry). This way, you can just hollow out however many strawberries you plan to eat at once and stuff them with filling to order.

Yields about 16 strawberries. Weight Watchers P+: 1 per strawberry. If you eat 2 it’s 2 P+, if you eat 4 it’s 4 P+. (P+ calculated using the recipe builder on weightwatchers.com).
Nutrition per berry from myfitnesspal.com: 35 calories, 5 g carbs, 2 g fat, 1 g protein, 0 g fiber