Caramel Apple Crisp Cheesecake Bars

I just made these a couple of days ago and they are delicious! I love the flavour of the cream cheese with ginger and cinnamon. I am leaving off the caramel topping for two reasons: 1) they are awesome as they are and don’t need to be any sweeter 2) I am using them as finger food and I think the caramel would be too sticky. I might make them sometime as a plated dessert and then would consider a little caramel topping (and maybe a dab of whipped cream).

I didn’t have any trouble getting the crust to spread over the bottom of a 9 X 13 pan. I like the idea of adding chopped apples to the crisp topping. Slicing the apples was the only fiddly part of this. I expect I will make this again.

It smells delicious and was pretty easy to make, my only suggestion would be doubling the crust or using a smaller pan size because it barely covered the bottom of the pan it says to use, and make sure the cream cheese is VERY softened, mine was room temp and that wasn’t soft enough to mix it well, I ended up microwaving the mix and mixing in about 3, 30 second intervals because it was hard to mix and spreading it over the crust just took the crust with it and I had to mix the little bit of crust in with it and make a new crust in a new pan… I also just diced up the apples and mixed them with the crumble topping and it worked just fine for me.