Pumpkin Cheesecake Balls

The other day, my friend Sara posted that she finally found a pumpkin cheesecake recipe that she enjoyed. As our church Thanksgiving dinner was approaching, I wanted to make something amazing. I decided I would try this Paula Deen Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe. I thought I would make it twice, once to try it out and make sure it was a good recipe and once for our Thanksgiving dinner at church. Let me tell you that the recipe was delicious! Well, I decided that I would repeat that for last night.

So I decided to make this pumpkin cheesecake on Saturday evening to give it time to chill and set up for Sunday evening. I made this at my mom's house and she was kind enough to bring it to church for me, she cut it for me and even brought be a little cool whip for the top. I, being a good girl, decided I would get my dessert and let others get in line for the food ;) I am so thankful that I picked my pumpkin cheesecake, because it tasted absolutely hideous! My face puckered up like it was the most bitter thing that had been placed in my mouth. I promptly pulled that off the dessert table and hid it from everyone else. Oh, my goodness this was bad! I forgot to put the sugar in the cheesecake. Funny thing is, this isn't the first time I forgot to put sugar in something pumpkin. When I was a teenager, I decided I would make pumpkin pie. My brother tasted one bite of it, discreetly made a funny face, and then continued to eat the entire slice. I didn't realize the problem until I took a bite. I left out all the sugar. We tried to rectify this by putting sugar in it later, but that's how I knew my brother really did love me. . . he ate my sugarless pie and acted like it was tasty! Anyway, I decided I would bring it home and see if I could salvage something out of this.

I put all of my cheesecake into a large bowl, graham cracker crust and all. I added powdered sugar, probably about 1 1/2 to 2 cups. I thought the powdered sugar would be better than granulated sugar (or plain sugar as we call it in our house). I was afraid the granulated sugar would be too grainy and not dissolve all the way. It might have been fine; that was just my thought process. I pretty much added powdered sugar--to taste. After this was all blended, I chilled it for a bit; it was pretty sticky. Once it firmed up a bit, I used my medium sized pampered chef scoop and made some "cheesecake balls" and placed them on parchment paper on a sheet pan. I placed them in the freezer to firm up some more. I left them there overnight, but probably an hour is all it needed.

After removing it from the freezer

Once I pulled them out of the freezer, I coated them in some white Wilton Candy Melts. I used my trick of putting about a tablespoon of Crisco in the candy melts to make them coat a little better. I also found some "pumpkin spice" candy melts at the store. I melted a little of that as a little decoration on top of them.

Covered in white candy melts

What I learned in all of this. . . sometimes mistakes are just absolutely horrible mistakes and you just have to throw it all away and start over. Sometimes mistakes can be fixed, and it turns in to something beautifully delicious!

Drizzled with "pumpkin spice" candy melts

******I need to add something here to my original post. Just because you don't royally mess up your cheesecake, doesn't mean you can't make cheesecake balls. Just the same with cake balls, just use your leftover cheesecake of whatever flavor, or use a store bought one or make one just to use as cheesecake balls. The consistency will be slightly different from a cake ball, but your end results will be AMAZE-BALLS!!!!! Use the method, you don't necessarily have to use the recipe, but the Paula Deen recipe that I have posted the link to is quite amazing.**********************