These no bake orange cranberry cheesecake parfaits are made with leftover (or your favorite) cranberry sauce and a simple gingersnap crumble made of gingersnap crumbs and butter baked at 350F for 10 minutes. Fancy, but so easy to make.
6oz(about 20-22 hard gingersnap cookies (not soft molasses cookies)
2Tablespoonssoft butter
To Assemble
Orange Cream
Gingersnap Crumble
Your favorite cranberry sauce, about 1 1/2 cups**
Garnishes (optional)
Lightly sweetened whipped cream
quartered slices of orange
sugared cranberries
rosemary tips
Instructions
To Make the Orange Cream
In the bowl of your stand mixer, beat the cream cheese until smooth, scraping bowl as necessary, about 2 minutes.
Add the orange juice concentrate, granulated sugar, orange zest, orange liqueur, orange oil or extract and salt. Beat until completely smooth, scraping the bowl and the paddle as necessary. Set aside.
In another bowl, whip the cream and vanilla to medium peaks. Whisk a third of the whipped cream into the orange mixture to lighten it and then fold in the rest of the cream until there are no streaks remaining.
For the Gingerbread Crumble
Whir the cookie crumbs up in your blender or food processor until they're mostly fine crumbs. A few bigger pieces are fine, but you don't want any huge cookie chunks. Add the butter and pulse until the crumbs start to clump together. Scrape out onto a Silpat or parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake at 350F for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and cool completely, Crush into crumbs.
To Assemble
You can do this any way you see fit, but for the wine glasses and the trifle glasses, I started with a handful of crumbs spread out evenly. Then I carefully added some orange cream, sort of pressing it in place rather than spreading it because I didn't want the cookies to get pulled up and into the cream layer.
Once the orange layer was smooth, I added a thin layer of cranberry sauce.
I repeated the layers once more, chilled for a good 4 hours and then garnished.
Notes
**If your favorite cranberry sauce is really chunky, heat it up and either run it through the blender or press it through a medium sieve. You want relatively smooth sauce for pretty layers.