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As we are closing in the holiday season,  I have been thinking about making some festive appetizers.   This one in particular, comes to mind.   This appetizer is a spur of the moment experiment, one that took place one Christmas Eve. I had been finishing up making some appetizers for the family. With a few leftover ingredients we had we decided to try and use up those extras and the result was a delicious hot appetizer.   The leftover items included:   Phyllo sheets, cream cheese, cranberry sauce, and some salted cashews.   Baking them in a mini muffin pan to create these cute little Phyllo dough cups.   The result was a sweet and creamy,  hot and flaky, amazing appetizer.  If you like sweet and salty, you will love these!

Ingredients:

1. 4 sheets of phyllo dough 
2. 8 oz cream cheese 
3. ½ can whole cranberry, cranberry sauce 
4. ¾ cup chopped cashews ( roasted and salted)
5.  ½ cup melted butter 
6. 1 tbsp freshly chopped rosemary for garnish ( optional)

Directions:

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• preheat oven to 400 ℉
• unroll thawed phyllo dough.
  Carefully remove 1 sheet of dough and place it on a clean workspace. Using a pastry brush coat the dough lightly with butter.
• place the 2nd sheet of dough directly over the first and cover it with butter. Continue the process with 2 more sheets of dough ( 4 layers).

*keep phyllo dough covered with a slightly damp paper towel so it doesn’t dry out.

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• cut dough into 15 squares with a very sharp knife. 
  

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• place each square into the mini muffin pan cups and fill each with a ½ teaspoon of cream cheese.
  

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• place ½ teaspoon of cranberry sauce on the top of the cream cheese.
  

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• sprinkle each cup with chopped cashews.
  

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• bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until edges of the dough are golden.
  

Check out these other autumn favorites!