Food You Can Eat: Pillsbury™ Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bars

Recently, while perusing an online supermarket circular, which I do to instruct the Forager-in-Chief about what to hunt and gather, I noticed that they were now excited to be able to offer Pillsbury chocolate chip cookie dough. Presumably you use this to make “home-made” chocolate chip cookies, but I thought, Pillsbury has hundreds or thousands of recipes using their ingredients and certainly the chocolate chip cookie dough could be put to some less pedestrian pursuit. And I was right.

1 8-oz. bar of cream cheese. I use the Philadelphia brand, and 8 oz. is the standard size, handily enough.

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1/2 cup coconut, “if desired.” Why the hell not. I did not have the patience to hack into a coconut, and chances are F-i-C wouldn’t be able to find one locally, so he brought home a small packet of shredded coconut. This sufficed. He found this in the baking aisle, FYI, not with the fruit and vegetables.

1 16.5-oz. (467.77 grams; I’m just teasing) roll of Pillsbury™ Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

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So simple. Heat an oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl mix together the cream cheese, sugar, and egg with a hand mixer. If you don’t have one you really should because they’re pretty cheap. If you are hand mixer-hesitant, do it the old-fashioned way with a wooden spoon but that is time-consuming and tiring. When that becomes a nice creamy texture stir in the coconut, if using, with a spoon, don’t use the hand mixer.

In an 8X8 pan take half the cookie dough and, with floured fingertips (I wish I had learned this trick decades ago) press it into a flat bottom. You do this so the dough doesn’t stick to your hands and get wasted. Pillsbury has a warning that you shouldn’t eat raw cookie dough. Using a spatula, spread the creamy mix on top and create an even layer. Then, sprinkle the remaining half of the dough on that. There’s no real way to make a topsheet out of it and besides, it will give it a real “home-made and not from the bakery” look, even if it is only you who will consume all of it which guests will appreciate.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes (with my oven 35 was quite enough) “until golden brown and firm to the touch.”

Let it cool for half an hour and then chill for another 2 hours at least. Pillsbury doesn’t tell you this but the reason why you don’t go directly from oven to fridge is it’s too much of a shock for your 8X8 and its contents. It would be like a deep-sea diver being pulled suddenly to the surface, and there are no decompression chambers for Pillsbury chocolate cheesecake bars that I know of, but it’s been a while since I’ve been on the Williams Sonoma website.

Pillsbury says to cut these into 4 rows X 4 columns squares and serves 16. That’s nonsense. I cut them 3 rows X 3 columns and it ended up serving 1, me, because I plated them, covered with plastic wrap, they refrigerate very well, and ate them 1 or 2 per day. Better Half wouldn’t, and the Ravenous Hound couldn’t, join me. I almost never cook with coconut so I think BH is secretly nauseated by it.