The Best Cookies for Any Bake Sale
Sometimes the weather just calls for cookies.
While it is very firmly spring now, we sometimes get late cold fronts and even ice storms into April, where we are. We've had hard freezes as far into the year as mid-May, even. And cold days like that are an excellent excuse to make cookies.
This time we ran a little short on butter and had to get creative. So we combined the idea of cream cheese snowball cookies and shortbread thumbprint cookies and ended up with this sweet little hybrid: chocolate cream cheese thumbprint cookies.
Ingredients:
1 8 oz block cream cheese
1/2 stick butter
1 egg
1/4 c bakers cocoa
2 1/4 c all-purpose flour
1 c sugar
1/2 tsp almond extract
2 tsp vanilla extract
2-3 tbsp raspberry preserves
Tools:
Cookie sheet
Parchment paper
mixing bowls
microwave safe dish or saucepan (to melt butter and cream cheese)
measuring cups and spoons
spoon
ziploc bag
toothpick or scissors or sharp knife
Before we get started here, you should know that two of your ingredients are going to be your problem children. The butter and the cream cheese are going to be solid when you start out, but they really need to be liquid in order to do their jobs here. So we need to melt them - carefully. Most people use the microwave to accomplish this, but we have had terrible luck with that in the past (think exploding and/or scorched edges and untouched centers despite careful timing and frequent stirring). We prefer to use the stovetop and a saucepan over the lowest possible heat and stir every minute or so.
Cream cheese does melt, it's just stubborn. This is definitely not a recipe where you can substitute in cream cheese's lower-fat sibling, Neufchatel cheese. Leave it over the heat until you have no more lumps. You'll need to be extra patient with this step, sorry.
As with any doughy recipe, mix your wet ingredients in one bowl (be sure to break the yolk on the egg, you want it to incorporate fully) and your dry ingredients in another. This helps prevent finding big lumps of crumbly, un-mixed flour or globs of sticky egg when you go to work the dough into individual cookies.
Stir together the contents of your two mixing bowls in the larger of the two bowls. Don't overdo it, because the cookies will be tough if you get carried away.
Once everything is mixed well, divide your dough into 36 balls. We know, three dozen feels like a weird number to shoot for, but it's what our test batch turned out to have after we split off comfortable serving-sized pieces.
Put down a layer of parchment paper on your baking sheet and preheat your oven to 375 degrees.
Place each of the dough balls destined to become cookies on the sheet. They don't spread much at all, so as long as there's some space between them to press them, you can really pack them in.
Press lightly on each one with your thumb (or a spoon, or literally anything that will slightly flatten the dough and create a little well for your raspberry preserves). The goal here is to flatten the ball of dough into a thick disc, leaving a little divot in the center that doesn't create a slope to the outside edges of the cookie. If you like runny messes of preserves, that's your business - but we'd very much prefer it stay where we put it.
Once all the cookies are shaped and ready for the preserves, fill a ziploc bag with the preserves and use something sharp to cut or poke a little hole in one corner. Utilize it like a piping bag, squeezing a little bit of preserves into each cookie. Try not to overfill any of the wells, as they'll make an epic mess if you do.
Place the cookies in the oven and bake for 10-12 minutes. Allow them to cool on the cookie sheet for at least ten minutes before you try to move them - they'll still be very soft when you take them out of the oven, and they'll need that extra few minutes to firm up a little.
We know it's tempting to eat them right away - they smell so good, after all! - but please, please give them time to cool. Otherwise, you'll be like us and burn the roof of your mouth on what feels like molten lava.
We won’t ask if you’re going to try making them this time. These are too good not to try. So instead, let us know over on our Facebook, what other types of jam do you think you could pair with this?
Since you wound up here, and you’ve read all the way to the bottom, when was the last time you had a maintenance check for your appliances? If you haven’t done it in at least a year, you might consider having one. Spring and fall are the best times to have your appliances checked out, rather than the chaos of the holidays or the heat of the summer. Getting an experienced technician to walk through all of your problems now can mean your appliances are less likely to fail during the heat of the summer.
If that type of preparation is something you’re interested in, give us a call ((214) 599-0055) or reach out to us via our contact page. We’ll work with you to set up a time and date that works for your schedule and send out one of our technicians to work with you. At Appliance Rescue Service, our goal is to keep your home running smoothly.