Making Pumpkin Cheesecake

8. Soften Cream Cheese

Remove the cream cheese from its cardboard package and foil wrapper. It works best to put the cream cheese in a shallow saucer. Using the shallow saucer will ease getting it off when it has been softened. Use a microwavable dish. We gave our cream cheese 30 seconds. That did the job. Do one package at a time. Put the softened cream cheese one at a time in the mixer bowl. We used a plastic scraper to get as much as we could into the bowl. We wipe any cream cheese that remained on the saucer. That way the next softening will not cook hard any remaining cream cheese.