Patty Ann's Cheese Cakes

Patty Ann’s cheese cakes are not what the name suggests. These are not slabs of New York-style cheesecake but rather bite-sized tarts baked in muffin tins, a Midwestern Christmas-cookie-tin regular that has kept its place on dessert tables for generations.

The signature is the cream cheese pastry crust. Butter, cream cheese, and flour pressed directly into muffin cups with your fingers, no rolling pin required. The cream cheese in the dough makes the crust tender, flaky, and slightly tangy, a far better backbone for sweet fillings than a plain shortcrust would be.

Two fillings let you split the batch and please two camps at once. A brown sugar pecan filling drinks like a miniature pecan pie. A granulated sugar coconut filling bakes up chewy and fragrant. Both get only a teaspoon per cup, which is the whole point: small, rich, and gone in two bites.

Kitchen Tips

• Bring the cream cheese and butter for the crust to full room temperature. Cold fats resist blending and give you a tough, cracked dough.
• Do not overfill. A heaping teaspoon of filling looks stingy in the cup, but these expand as they bake and will overflow if you go bigger.
• Run a sharp paring knife around each tart the moment they come out of the oven. Wait until they cool and the caramelized filling will glue them into the pan.
• Store between sheets of waxed paper in a tin. They keep for a week at room temperature, or freeze for up to two months.

Variations

• Swap the pecans for walnuts or a mix of pecans and chocolate chips for a turtle-style tart.
• Stir a tablespoon of rum or bourbon into the pecan filling for a grown-up edge.
• Top the coconut tarts with a single maraschino cherry pressed in before baking for a vintage Betty Crocker look.