Now that it’s Fall, I am going to be all about the baking.
And what do we think of when we think of Fall? (No…it’s not just pumpkin.)
Leaves! Leaves turning orange and red and dripping from the trees and crunching underfoot. I think maple should feature as prominently in our Fall lineup as all the pumpkin and warm spices we normally expect at every turn.
And these cookies, sweet with sappy maple syrup and spiced with nutmeg, are the perfect bite of Fall.
My son loves to make up creative desserts.
A few weeks ago, I told him I like cookie dough ice cream, and he responded that he was making me a “super delicious” cookie dough out of salt, pepper, baking soda, and sugar.
He may need to grow a little in his understanding of baking chemistry.
But he still has some seriously good ideas! Like s’mores cookies. Which were totally scrumptious, and totally his idea.
These cookies are so great. Stretchy, sweet marshmallows, mild graham flavor, and milk chocolate. Summer will thank you.
Are you into cookie butter?
It’s basically like peanut butter…except made from pulverized cookies. You know. Because your sweet tooth wasn’t getting enough attention.
I have meant to make a homemade cookie butter recipe for you at Christmas for about three years now (it makes a great foodie gift in a cute jar!)…but every Christmas slides by without me doing it. So if you are asking yourself why I am sharing a warmly spiced spread with you in the middle of a boiling summer….well, it’s Christmas in July this year!
Oh boy.
Taste buds, get ready for a treat! It’s cookies. Cookies with everything good in them: cookies filled with more cookies as well as cream cheese and milk chocolate and malted milk powder.
These are sneaky, late night, guilty pleasure cookies. These cookies are the masters of the school yard, and everyone else might as well just go home.
Yesterday, Jake decided to read all of my cookbooks. He pulled pretty much every single book off the shelf, one at a time, to ooh and aah over the glorious photos and recite every single letter in every single recipe title.
That kid. Adorable.
Somehow in the middle of this, I developed a hankering for peanut butter cookies. I’m pretty sure that was Jake’s goal all along.
These are not your average criss-cross peanut butter cookie, oh no. These are thin, crispy-edged delights with soft, gooey centers. These are milk chocolate chip cookies to the max, plus a hint of snickerdoodle. In short, these peanut butter beauties are all kinds of amazing.
I’ve been feeling pretty grinchy this Christmas season.
This isn’t a fun time of year to be forbidden from eating any dairy of any kind. I have been lusting after trays of cookies and holiday cheese balls and getting grumpier and grumpier.
But I just can’t imagine Christmastime without holiday baking, even if I can’t eat the spoils myself.
And wouldn’t you know it, the cookie that was at the top of my list to try this year actually turned out to be dairy free! And gluten free!
Surprise!
These cinnamon stars (little German lesson for you: Zimt = cinnamon, Sterne = stars. Literal naming at work…) are chewy and moist and simply amazing. Especially if you thought you were staring down a month without cookies. If you know anyone with food sensitivities, make these immediately. They will be so grateful!
I’m in the middle of my second one of these cookie-brownie bars as I type this, smearing my keyboard with buttery fingers and dropping tiny shards of Oreo between the keys.
I’m actually not sure I’m going to be able to stop eating these. They are that good!
If you live within a 5-mile radius of me, have mercy and come over to eat some sugar. Save me from myself!
I don’t know about you, but I love a good gooey dessert. Especially a good gooey cookie or a good gooey butter cake.
And these tea cakes are the best of both of those!
Soft and slightly underbaked, richly vanilla, with a sweet tangy glaze.
Yum.
When I was a kid, the local grocery store was famous for their rainbow sugar cookies. Everyone I knew loved them.
Everyone except me. I thought they tasted funny. These cookies were probably the only dessert I would actually decline as a kid. They just didn’t wow me. The bright colors didn’t fool me (I had also figured out that sprinkles didn’t actually make ice cream taste more delicious…go figure), and I just wasn’t going for them.
For years, I eschewed food coloring. (This may also have had something to do with the fact that I was afraid of pink foods actually tasting like strawberries…either way, no good.)
But now my oldest is nearly 3 (!!), and I have realized that for him, color does make something more awesome. He literally likes to go around naming all his favorite colors of Legos, crayons, Play-Doh (news flash, it’s every color in the rainbow), sometimes spending more time talking about the colors than actually playing with his toys. Sprinkles are beautiful and food coloring is delicious.
Of course, I still have a rule that food should be primarily yummy and secondarily pretty, but when I spotted a recipe for rainbow swirled cookies on The PinterTest Kitchen, my Secret Recipe Club blog for August, I knew immediately that Jake would love them! Food crafts for kids!
There is just something special about these chocolate chip cookies.
They are dense and moist and a little tangy…they remind me quite a bit of Mrs. Fields cookies, rich and chocolatey and immensely soft, even after days.
And here’s the fun secret: they are made with cream cheese!