Merry Christmas: Cherry Cheese Pie

Merry Christmas!

I am celebrating a WHITE Christmas with my family today. I think I've only experienced one other white Christmas before, that I can remember anyways.

Even though it was cold, my mom's dog even liked the snow. She kept eating it.

Now onto the food. I made a cherry cheese pie for Christmas. The inspiration for this was whatever I could find in my mom's fridge and pantry, heh.

Ingredients
Store bought pie crust (if y'all have been following my blog for a while, you have probably noticed that I'm not a big fan of making dough from scratch, much less dealing with it in general)
1 can of cherry pie filling
1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1/3 teaspoon vanilla extract
(I pretty much just cut the recipe for the base of my cheesecake fillings that I typically use for all cheesecake recipes into a third)

Directions 
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Roll the crust out into a 9 inch pie pan/dish. The reason this is the first step is that I like to let dough come to room temperature before baking it.
Prepare the cheese filling by creaming the sugar and vanilla extract into the cream cheese with an electric mixer until smooth. Then beat the egg into the mixture until everything is combined and smooth.
Pour the cherry pie filling into the crust first, then layer the cream cheese filling on top. You can also combine the cherry and cream cheese fillings together for a different taste and effect.
Bake for about 15 minutes at 425 degrees F, then lower the temperature to 350-375 degrees F and bake until the center is almost set (approximately 20-30 minutes). To check if the center is set, I always jiggle the pie and see if the center still moves, like jello or not. Remember that typically baked desserts like pies and cheesecakes continue to bake when taken out of the oven, so it's good to take it out when the center is ALMOST set, but not completely.

Don't be afraid to experiment with recipes you already know by creating new recipes from what you have already available in your kitchen. Especially if you're snowed in or can't bare to be out in the cold to go to the grocery store. You never know when something will turn out horrible great!

New goal for the next year: start trying to make dough for these kind of recipes from scratch!