Red White and Blueberry Cheesecake

Every year on the 4th of July my family makes a cake with the American flag on it, (not the most original idea but a solid one considering the occasion!) I think my mom saw it in a magazine once when we were kids, she used to make it with white Sarah Lee cake, the kind you can get frozen at the grocery store. I, however, am I huge cheesecake fan and have been making it as a cheesecake for the past few years. It's light, fluffy, and tastes great after a nice big plate of barbeque! I got to go home to Portland for the 4th this year and made it for the fam, they loved it and so did I! I don't have kids, but I think it would be fun for them to make as far as assembling the berries onto the cake, the cheesecake filling is pretty simple too.

Ingredients:

1 Ready-Made Graham Cracker Pie Crust

16 Ounces Cream Cheese, softened

14 Ounces Cool Whip

1/2 Cup Blueberries

5 Ripe Strawberries

1/3 Cup Sugar

1 and 1/2 Teaspoons Vanilla Extract

Using a mix master, blend together the cream cheese and whipped cream until fluffy and smooth and there are no longer cream cheese chunks, (you can do this by hand as well, but it will take quite a while to get all the clumps of cream cheese to blend in with the whipped cream). Add the sugar and vanilla extract and mix well.

Pour the cheesecake filling into the graham cracker pie crust. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour to help solidify the texture. In the meantime, cut the strawberries into thin slices length-wise. Then lay those slices flat and cut them in half again, as seen in the first picture.

Decorate the cake with the berries within an hour and a half before you plan on serving the cake, I say this only because the red in the strawberries can bleed slightly onto the white, depending on how juicy the strawberries are, and if you're dead set on having a pristine shade of white around the strawberry slices then the closer you can decorate the cake to the time you'll be presenting it the better.

Now, place the blueberries in straight lines covering the upper 1/4 corner of the cake. Then take your strawberry slices and lay them out in lines facing the same direction with about an inch of white space between each row. Serve chilled.