Mom Says Just One Bite!: Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes

I have always loved potatoes and we sure do eat a lot of potatoes in my house...I'd say at least once a week in some form or another. Only over the past few years have I started branching out to the sweet potato. I used to make them using the canned yams, but they are packed in so much sweet heavy syrup which I am not a big fan of. I always went with the standard boring sweet potato casserole in which you mash them, stir in a whole bunch of brown sugar, heavy cream and butter. On top of that, my kids would beg for me to throw on some mini marshmallows. Over time I eventually cut out the marshmallows, decreased the sugar and swapped out the heavy cream for our standard 2% milk. Then one day, in an attempt to be more healthy I decided I would just make plain old fashioned baked sweet potatoes (I will admit that I did then add a little butter, cinnamon and brown sugar which I guess kind of cancels out the healthy part...oh well) and I discovered how much better the real ones taste. Of course, the canned version does have the added bonus of saving time because it only takes 5 seconds to open a can vs. the hour it takes to bake a real one, but if you do have the time I say bake them. Baking them makes them so deliciously sweet and you end up with this beautiful, brilliant orange vegetable that could easily pass as a dessert. The canned ones are kind of this weird brownish rust color that honestly don't look very appetizing. I have most recently started using them to make sweet potato fries, but I really wanted to try something new tonight. I started thinking about all the ways you can make a regular potato. Mashed....done it. French Fries....made those. What about twice baked?!? So I put some thought into it and the following recipe is what I came up with.

Tyler gave them a 5.5 out of 10 because they "tasted a little funky" (he isn't a cream cheese fan) but he did finish all of his. Brenna LOVED them though...and she is normally not a fan of sweet potatoes. She even used it to dip her broccoli in. I thought it pretty much ended up tasting like a piece of pumpkin cheesecake with a slight hint of salt. The brown sugar easily could have been decreased to 1/4 cup. They are really filling and my family only ended up eating half of what I anticipated us eating. Yeah....leftovers for lunch! They look really pretty....I wish I had a piping bag with one of those cool tips because then I could have made them look REALLY pretty! I could have closed my eyes and pretended that for just a moment I was at a classy restaurant...without kids! Guess eating them at my kitchen table with my family is a pretty close second though.

Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes:
5 medium sweet potatoes
1 8 oz. package fat free cream cheese, softened
1/3 c. brown sugar
2 tbsp. margarine
1 tbsp. vanilla
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Chopped pecans and more cinnamon as topping

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Clean the sweet potatoes and place them on a foil lined baking sheet. Bake for 1 hour.

While potatoes are baking, mix all remaining ingredients in a large bowl and set aside. Aiden was up early from his nap so my Assistant Chef had an Assistant Chef today.

This has nothing to do with the recipe, I just thought it was a funny picture!

Watching the sweet potatoes bake. Again, this is not part of the recipe. Watching or not watching the potatoes will not change the finished product in any way. If you have nothing better to do than sit in front of your oven for an hour, more power to you!

My Assistant Chef's Assistant Chef wanted to mix. "Like this mama?"

Good job Aiden!!

The filling without the sweet potato.

After 1 hour of baking, my sweet potatoes looked like this.

Cut each potato in half and scoop out the insides, adding the pulp to the bowl of filling. Make sure you leave a small layer of potato along the skin for support or else the skin will collapse in on itself making them impossible to refill.

All ready to be filled!

The filling before being mixed.

Using an electric hand mixer, mix on high speed until creamy! YUM!

Add filling to empty sweet potato skins. Top with pecans (or any other nut of your choice) and sprinkle with additional cinnamon. Put back in the oven for another 10-15 mins.