What a great idea! I tasted the first one and it just seemed to need something a little extra so I added some very finely grated pepper jack cheese and a touch of garlic then piped in the holes with a cake decorating bag and tip piping a tip of the mixture on the bottom of the olive so they would stick to the plate and remain standing.
These can be offered fabulously if you use extra large and medium olives. Gather some fancy cellophaned toothpics and a couple of big woody carrots peeled and some pimentos. Slice a disc off of the carrot and cut a small wedge from that disc. Insert the little wedge you cut from it into one of the smaller olives. Then cut a slit in a large olive and fill with cream cheese so that the cream cheese shows. Use the fancy toothpick to hold the big olive (with cream cheese showing) to the carrot disc and the small olive on top - it's a penguin! The little carrot wedge is its beak! A slice of pimento can be wrapped around its "neck" like a scarf. The wedge cut from the disk makes it look like its feet. They're quick and utterly adorable!!!!! I serve them on a fake "beach" made from blue colored unflavored jello and raw white rice covered with cling wrap but they're cute just gathered on a tray looking for a good Christmas party! Always a hit!
I loved these! I added some minced onion garlic powder and a bit of cayenne to the cream cheese mixture which added a nice flavor to these yummy morsels!
This is a great recipe. I used garden herbed cream cheese for more flavour. Excellent. Served as an appetizer for Thanksgiving and received great reviews. Thank you.
These taste GREAT!! here are a few things that I think help take them over the top. First I used canned Jumbo olives drained and soaked over night in water to remove the briney taste. Next I used Philly Vegetable Cream Cheese... I have to tell you these were GONE before I even had a chance to notice I needed to make more.
I mixed some ranch powder cream cheese & grated parmesan. I love olives and I love cream cheese but the olive doesn't hold enough cream cheese so it's very over powering. I would suggest fresh olives and not canned because of the strong olive taste. Also it's very hard to make it look pretty. As soon as I had 6 or so standing one would fall and cause a domino effect. The toothpicks don't help them stand either.
I really wanted to love these since cream cheese and olives are two of my favorite things but I just couldn't. The flavor of the olive just overpowered the cream cheese.
I mixed the cream cheese with some sour cream and a bit of Hidden Valley Ranch mix. I squeezed the mixture into the olives with a Ziploc bag cut at the corner. It was easy and people ate them up. I'm thinking of trying something with Feta cheese next time...
This recipe was great my sister and grandma couldn't get enough of them! They looked nice when I served them on a vegetable plater too!!!
