This year's food blogger cookie swap was amazing! We partnered up with four different companies - OXO, Dixie Crystals Sugar, Grandma's Molasses, and Gold Medal Flour, all of whom matched our contributions - to donate money to Cookies for Kids Cancer and we raised over $13K!! Can you believe that? And this was from each blogger submitting only $4 each. All because of cookies! Cookies and a good cause? You can't get much better than that!
These were my husband's favorite. He is a huge fan of gingersnaps so he was excited when we opened this box!
A big THANK YOU to Julie from The Little Kitchen and Lindsay from Love and Olive Oil for hosting the cookie swap again this year and we'll see you next year!
It's that time of year again! Time fooooooooooooooor...........
Yes! Woohoo! (Pardon me while I do my happy dance with my cookies.) I send out three sets of delicious cookies and I receive three different sets of cookies! I knew very early on this year that THESE cookies were the ones I was going to send off. They were so different and yet so... homey. Everyone loves snickerdoodles. Most people love apples. How no one managed to combine these together until now is beyond me. I even neglected posting this recipe countless times because if I did, that meant I couldn't send off these cookies. And we couldn't have that, now could we? I really hope that everyone I sent these cookies to enjoyed them as much as I did! (And my husband, who requested me to make a second batch for himself because the batch I made to send off made exactly 36 cookies.)
Note: This recipe requires you to use boiled cider (available here). It is absolutely one of my favorite ingredients ever! It allows you to give a hint of apple flavor to your baked goods without actually having apples in them.
Apple
Snickerdoodles adapted
slightly from King Arthur Flour’s Baking Sheet
Cookies:
¾ c. Vegetable Shortening
¼ c. (½ stick) Unsalted Butter, softened
1 ½ c. Sugar
1 Egg (large)
¼ c. Boiled Cider
2 tsp. Baking Powder
½ tsp. Salt
2 ¾ c. All Purpose Flour
Spiced
Sugar Coating:
2 tsp. Baking Spice
½ c. Sugar
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
In a small bowl, mix both ingredients of your sugar coating and set aside.
Using a stand mixer, beat the shortening, butter, and sugar together until
smooth.
Add in your egg, beating until smooth.
Mix in the boiled cider, baking powder, and salt.
Finally, add in your flour, mixing until combined. (This batter is THICK!)
Using a tablespoon of dough, round the dough with your hands and then coat in your
spiced sugar mixture.
Place them on a non-stick cookie sheet (or one that’s covered in parchment),
leaving around 1 ½” between them.
Dip the bottom of a glass in the spiced sugar mixture and press each cookie
down gently until they are around ½” thick.
Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until lightly golden.
Allow them to cool on a rack.
Eat and Enjoy!!
Here is a picture of my cookies ready to be packed away!
That was one really cute container!
And now, off to the post office! They grow up so fast, don't they? One minute, they're in your kitchen and the next, they're traveling around the country.
The people who were matched with me and sent some seriously good cookies were...
Williams Kitchen who sent some yummy Chocolate Chip and Oatmeal cookies
Second was Adri at Food-n-Thought who sent Nutella Cherry Oatmeal Florentine Cookies. Yes, that title is a mouthful which is exactly what the cookies ended up as!!
My final batch of cookies came from The Tale of Two Kitchens - a blog I actually found before the cookie swap that I just fell in love with! Her Minty Mascarpone Oreo Snowflake Cookies were my husband's favorite. (I think I got one.)
This was my entry into The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap!
In order to participate, the blogger has to use a recipe they haven't posted on their blog before. They could've made it a hundred times but as long as it wasn't on the blog, it was fair game. Yeah, I have some cookies that I haven't posted yet but I wanted to do something new and different. A brand new recipe! Yay! I do cookies all the time but I rarely make biscotti, which technically fall under the umbrella term of "cookie". I've only made them a couple of times before and they have always turned out great. And they are especially good cookies to ship, which I had to do with three people. Biscotti in Italian literally means "twice baked". Twice baking the biscotti dries it out which makes it a great cookie to dip into your morning coffee (or in my case, mug after mug of milk). I'll be posting pictures of the cookies I received along with links to their blogs in a future post.
So why black and white? Well, like I said. I wanted to do something a little different. Making cookies is pretty simple and I wanted to do something not-so-simple yet memorable. I had thougth and thought about what to make. Do I simply alter an existing recipe which I know works or do I think out of the box? When I came across this recipe on the KAF website, I knew that was the recipe. The world was suddenly right. Birds chirped on my fingertips while deer and rabbits hopped around me. Okay, well, maybe not quite that dramatic ;) But I knew that this was the recipe I was meant to post. Yes, that recipe was created just for me (completely disregard the fact that this recipe was developed back in 2009 and lots of other people have made it).
I hope that the folks who received these cookies all enjoyed them. And if any of you out there decide to take on this recipe, I hope you enjoy them too :)
(My family and friends know I am a huge Seinfeld fan, so every time I mentioned these cookies, my husband and best friend would say, "Look to the cookie.")
6 Tbsp. Butter, salted
2/3 c. Sugar
1 1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
2 tsp. Vanilla
2 Eggs
2 c. All-Purpose Flour
2 Tbsp. Cocoa Powder
1/4 c. Mini Chocolate Chips
1 Packet of Sugar in the Raw (or 1 Tbsp.)
1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Grease a cookie sheet or line with parchment paper.
3. In a large bowl, combine the butter, sugar, baking powder, and vanilla.
4. Add in the eggs (it may look a little funky - that's okay.).
5. Stir in the flour and mix well. The dough will be sticky.
6. Divide the dough in half, placing one half on the cookie sheet and leaving the other in the bowl.
7. Now for the the first fun part - you need to spread the dough into a log of about 14" x 2 1/2". You'll need to wet your fingers with cold water in order to help this process otherwise you'll end up with sticky fingers (which is all well and good if you're five-years-old.)
8. Put the pan into the freezer.
9. In the remaining dough, mix in the cocoa powder.
10. Fold in the mini chocolate chips.
11. Remove the vanilla dough from the freezer and repeat Step 7 (the second fun part!).
12. Gently press the Sugar in the Raw onto the biscotti dough.
13. Bake for 25 minutes.
14. Remove from the oven and let cool for 10 to 25 minutes. (Or however long - it doesn't really matter.)
15. Using a serrated knife, slice the biscotti to about 3/4" thick.
16. Stand the biscotti on the pan and bake for another 30 to 40 minutes. They'll feel a little soft in the center but will continue to dry out as they cool.
17. Enjoy!
Hi folks! You might notice a lack of cookie recipes in the upcoming month. Why? Because I am participating in the 2nd Annual Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap! A ton of bloggers (over 500!) are participating in this year's event, including yours truly for the very first time :) Basically, all participants get names and addresses of three people who are participating and you have to send them one dozen cookies. So by the time it's all said and done, I'll have sent out 36 cookies and I'll be getting a dozen cookies from 3 different people. How cool is that??? I'm not allowed to post the recipe of which cookie I select to send out to the lovely people who get chosen for me so while I'm off experimenting with my recipes, I won't be posting them. However, you will get to see the finished recipe on Dec. 12th and I'll try to post pictures of the cookies I receive shortly thereafter. See y'all on Dec. 12th! (Yeah, I'll be around until then posting other stuff so I won't leave you completely since I know y'all love me so much =D )
