Golden Carrot Cookies

For cookies, these are pretty healthy! The cookie part uses 1 cup of mashed carrots and not very much sugar. They are more like little carrot muffins, soft and easy to eat without icing. The recipe calls for them to be iced with orange icing and that gave them a real "tang" and made them sweeter. They are similar to the Orange Drop cookies from a while ago. I used fresh-squeezed orange juice in the frosting and also used raw carrots instead of the bagged mini-carrots as sometimes those have a "plastic" aftertaste. The only drawback is that they will get very soft by tomorrow with Hawaii's weather!

Alice's Oatmeal Rounds

This was a much better cookie night! Alice knows her cookies...these were easy and tasty! Very crisp and using a sugar-coated glass bottom to flatten the dough gave them a crunchy top. They actually tasted like an oatmeal /snickerdoodle combo cookie. I hope they are as good tomorrow so the UH gang and Bob and Trish get the full effect!

Malted Milk Rounds

I don't know how this recipe ever made it into the cookbook. It was a nightmare to make and was not exceptionally tasty after all the work. I really would like to have a word with Betty Crocker right now after having a frustrating evening! The first challenge was finding malted milk powder. It took four stores and, as usual, found it at Times which is where I never expect to find anything. The dough had to refrigerate all night, which I did, but it still was so hard to roll out and cut with a cookie cutter that I had to resort to alternate means. Even adding quite a bit of flour, it still was impossible to do according to the directions. So, I put teaspoons on the cookie sheet and then flattened them with the back of a glass dipped in flour. The resultant shape was not round but I really didn't care. They also did not take as long to bake, probably because they were a bit thinner than rolled-out cookies. Also, the recipe called for an ungreased sheet. Yeah, right! After scraping the first batch off the tray, I then washed it off and did all the following trays on greased sheets. The final component of these cookies was to ice them with malted milk icing. The recipe looked like it was going to make way more than I thought I would need so I only made 1/2 the recipe. This gave a nice spot of icing for almost all the cookies. The icing dressed the cookies up but I think made them too sweet--even Guido agreed with that conclusion!!! It took so long to make them that it was too late to bring them down to Alex so hopefully I will see Alex tomorrow before he leaves so the UH people will get some. OK..glad this night is over!!!

No cookies tonight!

Just to let the early blog-checkers know that I am not baking tonight! The cookies dough is made but needs to be refrigerated overnight and I didn't get home early enough to chill it and bake it. They also need to be rolled out(ugh!) and then iced so it will be a two-night job. So, look forward to Thursday. Also, I am so happy about Kirk getting into TWO med schools today ( Commonwealth and Tulane) that its hard to focus!!! Congrats Kirk!!!!

Monkey-Faced Cookies

Sorry that I didn't post last night...I headed to bed after finishing the cookies as I was tired! Thanks for the vote of support for the executive decision, Kristen!! I look forward to the help when you get home. About these cookies, they are the first in the "family cookie" section and are supposed to be great fun for kids as you put 3 raisins on each cookie and they are supposed to look like faces when they bake. After looking at one tray, I decided to just put the 3 raisins in the middle of each blob of dough and not to try and make them look like eyes and mouth and they came out looking better. You can look at the picture and decide! As for the taste, they are a crisp molasses cookie. Not the best molasses cookie I've ever tasted but I like anything molasses...will see how crisp they are today after a rainy night. One word of advice, the directions say to let them stay on the ungreased tray for a minute before removing but they firmed up so fast that they were hard to get off so I took them off immediately. The whole thing about the raisins making faces seemed kind of silly but it was fun to look at them in the end...kids would have fun doing this!

Wunder-bar Cookies

Since I didn't bake last night as it was Halloween, I decided to bake two kinds of cookies today. Also, the Lemon Snowdrops did not make many cookies so this way there will be enough cookies for the UH group! These cute, little cookies are easy to make and easy to eat. Nothing exceptional about them but a good addition to a tray of cookies. I just wished they had brought the Phillies a bit more luck! Tomorrow is another day and hopefully they put the Yankees in their place! I have also made an executive decision and will work around the next chapter which is holiday cookies. I will make the cookies for the appropriate day( for example, St. Patrick cookies on St. Paddy's day!) but don't want to be making Easter cookies in November! There are quite a lot of Christmas cookies so I will start on them after Thanksgiving to stay with the season!

Lemon Snowdrop Cookies

These are pretty, tasty cookies with a nice lemony flavor in the filling. The cookies are really just shortbread but the filling gives it the "tanginess." The filling actually looks and tastes like the filling in lemon-filled donuts. The recipe for the filling actually made much more than I used so you could either use more filling per cookie or double the cookie part of the recipe and make more cookies overall.