Posts from the ‘Cookies’ Category

Sep 16

Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

I’m not sure if I was looking in the wrong place, but it seems I had a hard time finding a chocolate oatmeal cookie recipe. I could have just made up my own recipe, or a sort of Frankenstein combination, if you will, of a few different cookie recipes, but just as I was about to give up and do that, I found what I was after at Hershey’s Kitchens.

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A dark chocolate cookie with oats and chocolate chips! I used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder for these, and replaced the nuts in their recipe with semisweet chocolate chips.

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These cookies are so dark! I had a little trouble baking them, as I found that the middles stayed quite gooey, which made me want to bake them longer, but that resulted in a crunchier cookie. They’re actually quite chewy, and very chocolatey, although they become a little crunchier anyway the next day.

Oddly enough, the kids weren’t too fond of these; they’d eat about half of a cookie and leave the rest. That was fine with me though, it left more for the rest of us! :)

Sep 10

4 Comments

Cowboy Cookies

Okay, so that wasn’t much of a hiatus, was it! Let’s just say that I guess I won’t be going on a hiatus, I just won’t be updating quite as often!

Anyway, what did bring me out of my hiatus was Bakerella’s post about cowgirl/boy cookies. Her cookie-mix-in-a-jar was so adorable! I’m definitely going to be using that idea for gifts. Her recipe for cowgirl/boy looked so easy that I decided to quickly mix up the ingredients and bake a batch while my little boy was taking a nap.

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I couldn’t find the pink M&M’s that Bakerella used, but they can be bought at the M&M’s online shop. I just used the regular color mix of M&M’s.

These cookies were fantastic! I thought they tasted best straight out of the oven, but even on the third day they still tasted great. I think that this particular cookie-mix-in-a-jar would be a great gift for anyone, and I’d highly recommend that you go and make a batch of these for yourself too! :)

Aug 3

4 Comments

Costco Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Members of Costco look forward to their monthly coupon booklet, and if other members are like me, they get super excited when there’s a coupon for something from the bakery! Imagine how I felt when I saw a $2 coupon for Costco’s “gourmet chocolate chunk cookies” this month!

The cookies came in a pack of 24. After taste-testing one, I froze the rest of them to make them last as long as possible. The cookies are absolutely fanastic. They are soft and chewy, and the chocolate chunks are huge and delicious.

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But with 24 of these cookies, I wanted to try to do some more creative things with them, rather than just eat them as is, one by one. So first I made an ice cream sandwich.

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Which was great, but two of those huge cookies, plus vanilla ice cream, plus mini chocolate chips was a bit too much to eat all at once!

Next, after being inspired by a post from Our Best Bites about frozen pudding pops, I made vanilla pudding pops (using half and half) with chunks of Costco’s cookies and ribbons of fudge sauce.

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Okay, so that fudge sauce really didn’t work out very well! It gets solid in the refrigerator, so I thought it would freeze up solid in the freezer, but the warm water I need to use to unmold the pops melted the fudge sauce. Despite the horrible messy look to these pudding pops, however, they tasted amazing!

You might think that the chunks of cookie that went into these pops would freeze up too hard to bite into, but you’d be wrong. The pudding actually kept the cookie pieces soft and easy to bite into.

My last creative adventure for Costco’s cookies was simply a chocolate chip cookie sundae.

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I warmed the cookie in the microwave until it was really soft and the chunks were really gooey, scooped vanilla ice cream on top, as well as fudge sauce and a cherry.

But most of the cookies actually got eaten plain! I had stored in them in the freezer, but let them thaw out completely to room temperature before eating them. A quick zap in the microwave once they were at room temperature made them taste like they had just come from the oven. My crazy daughter preferred to eat them straight from the freezer!

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On a totally separate note, I’d like to say that I’m now 37 weeks pregnant. I have a habit of going early with my pregnancies, so anytime from now if you notice that I haven’t posted in over 4 days it would probably be safe to assume that the baby has arrived! I may take a brief hiatus from updating The Sweetest Kitchen for a few weeks after that, although I have a few other recipes currently waiting to be posted that I will try to go through first. Don’t worry though, because I will return! :)

Jul 22

4 Comments

Peanut Butter & Nutella Sandwich Cookies

This is just a very short post about combining two of my favorite spreads – peanut butter and Nutella. If you’re a frequent visitor, or if you just have a look through the archives, you’ll see that I’ve tried to combine these two spreads a couple of times in cookies, my favorite one having been the peanut butter cookies with swirls of Nutella.

I have a new favorite now, though. It’s the peanut butter sandwich cookie filled with plain Nutella.

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The directions are simple. Bake your favorite peanut butter cookies (in my case I used this flourless peanut butter cookie recipe), take two of the cookies, spread plain Nutella on one cookie and top it with the other cookie. Then eat!

These flourless peanut butter cookies are actually quite delicate, so it took some gentle spreading maneuvers with the Nutella to not break the cookie. But these are, by far, my favorite peanut butter cookies so I had to use them!

Jul 15

5 Comments

Sugar Cookie Bars

It has been a very long time since I’ve had homemade frosted sugar cookies. When I saw this recipe for sugar cookie bars from The Repressed Pastry Chef, I thought that this looked like a much easier way to make frosted sugar cookies and decided to try it out right away.

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I was majorly impressed. It tasted just like a sugar cookie! The only thing I did differently was divide the recipe for both the cookie and the frosting in half (because I didn’t want so much at once!) and baked it in an 8×11-inch glass baking dish. I had to shorten the baking time, but not by much.

If you need a quick sugar cookie fix, I would highly recommend trying out this recipe for sugar cookie bars!

Jun 26

2 Comments

Homemade Oreos

Last weekend we all drove to my parents’ house for a visit and also to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. Because I always talk about baking all kinds of sweet treats I thought I’d make something to take along for them to sample – I don’t see them often, so they very rarely get to try anything I’ve made.

I decided that cookies would be easiest to travel with, so I tried Smitten Kitchen’s homemade Oreos recipe.

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There has been a bit of a debate in Smitten Kitchen’s homemade Oreos comments about whether or not it is okay to use regular (not Dutch-processed) cocoa powder for these cookies. Well, I was out of Dutch-processed cocoa and used regular unsweetened Hershey’s cocoa powder to make these. They turned out just fine, and puffier, than the photos I have seen where people used Dutch-processed.

I thought they tasted similar to the good old Oreo cookie, but not quite. I actually did not like the taste of the homemade Oreos dunked in milk, but I love the store-bought Oreos dunked in milk.

The filling itself does taste very similar to the original. I probably double-stuffed my Oreos, as you can tell by the photo!

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I packaged up the cookies individually in mini treat bags and tied them with a silver twist tie to give to everyone, and everyone enjoyed them.

May 27

3 Comments

Surprise Cookies

I have a backlog of recipes and photos waiting to make their appearance on The Sweetest Kitchen. You can see photos of what’s in the queue in the sidebar, under My Food Photos. Today I’m posting about Surprise Cookies, which is a recipe from Martha Stewart’s COOKIES book. The recipe can be found here.

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The original recipe used regular marshmallows, but as you can see, these are pink strawberry marshmallows.

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These are very chocolatey. The strawberry taste of the marshmallow is subtle; I’d probably prefer to use regular marshmallows next time. The cookie itself is cake-like and soft.

My opinion is that I most likely wouldn’t make them again, as I didn’t think they were that great. The photos of them, especially the photo on Martha’s website, look great, but I personally didn’t care much for them. My daughter didn’t like them at all, but my 2-year-old son did!

May 16

4 Comments

Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies

I’ve been wanting to make these for quite a while now; they kept tempting me every time I opened Martha Stewart’s COOKIES book! Finally this past week I made a batch of them, and the whole family loved them.

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They’re barely even two-bite size and so cute! You can find the recipe here on Martha Stewart’s website (although the recipe is doubled in her COOKIES book).

May 6

4 Comments

Peanut Butter Toffee Cookies

This recipe for peanut butter toffee cookies was recently a Cookie of the Day at the Martha Stewart website. I’ve been interested in toffee lately, so I thought that this recipe might be a good way to incorporate some toffee into my baking.

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I used 2 Hershey’s brand Heath bars for this recipe, just the regular 1.4-ounce size you can find in the grocery store’s checkout lane.

I contemplated on using a different peanut butter cookie base, one that I knew and loved, but decided I’d go ahead with the one in the recipe. A different cookie recipe could definitely be used, as long as the cookie will be thick enough to distribute and hold the toffee pieces nicely (i.e. not a thin cookie).

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I got exactly 24 cookies. They’re pretty good, although as I suspected, I’m not totally fond of the peanut butter cookie itself. It’s a slightly crunchier sort of cookie with softer insides; I think the crunch of the toffee goes well with the crunchiness of the cookie, though.

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I really do like the idea of toffee pieces in cookies now, and I suspect I’ll be making different varieties of cookies with toffee in the future. :)

Apr 22

22 Comments

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

I was super excited when I saw Joy The Baker’s recent post on flourless peanut butter cookies because these cookies are made without flour (as the name would suggest!) and also without butter (in my previous post I noted that I’m out of butter!). The cookies require only four ingredients, and they bake up soft and chewy.

I’m so impressed with these cookies and am thankful to Joy for posting the recipe. If you’re short on staple baking ingredients (such as flour, butter or vanilla, etc.) and in need of a super quick sweet treat, I highly recommend these little gems.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies
Adapted from Joy The Baker & The Gourmet Cookbook

Ingredients
1 cup all-natural chunky or smooth peanut butter
1 cup sugar (1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup granulated sugar)
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking soda

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a baking sheet with butter and set aside. In a mixer combine peanut butter and sugars until well combined, about 2 minutes. Add egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes. Roll into walnut sized balls and create a cris-cross pattern with a fork. If you’d like, add a few chocolate pieces to the top of the cookies. Bake for 10 minutes, until lightly browned. Cool on a baking sheet for two minutes, then transfer to… your mouth.

Apr 12

Happy Easter!

I didn’t make anything specifically for Easter (except the baby bluebird cupcakes I made the other week). But we were surprised with an Easter cookie bouquet!

We had taken the kids to an Easter Egg Hunt at a local park yesterday and came home to find a box on our front porch. Inside was the Easter cookie bouquet – 5 huge butter cookies frosted with crunchy royal icing (and a slight hint of lemon?).

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