Walnut crispie cookies

Easy cookie recipes are my favourite, especially when friends decide to host a last minute party. I baked these yesterday morning and took them to a housecooling (as in the opposite of a housewarming) at night. Between the kids and adults, these things disappeared faster than the Easter eggs they were hunting earlier! Here are three cookies I set aside for a friend who didn't attend the event:


What I liked about the recipe was that it did not call for anything too unusual. I didn't have brown sugar or walnuts in stock, but didn't mind buying them because I knew the leftovers would be easy to use up. As for the rice crispies? They'll make a delicious breakfast over the next while!

• Walnut crispie cookies
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• 1 call-purpose flour
• 3/4 tspbaking soda
• 1/4 tspsalt
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• 1/3 cunsalted butter
• 1/2 cbrown sugar, packed
• 3egg yolks
• 1 Tbspsoy milk
• 1/3 cwalnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1 crice crispies
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• Sift flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside flour mixture.
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• Cream butter and brown sugar. Add egg yolks and mix well. Fold flour mixture into batter and mix. Stir in chopped walnuts and rice cripies.
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• Place each tablespoon of cookie dough 2" apart on lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 14 minutes.
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I chose vanilla flavoured rice crispies for these cookies and the scent held long after the cookies were done. Although regular rice crispies would have worked fine, they wouldn't have smelled nearly as heavenly. Here is a photo of the cookie dough:


I used a cookie scoop for the first time while working on this recipe and can't rave about it enough. It standardized the size of the cookies and made scooping a breeze! The only thing I forgot to take into consideration was that the dough was pretty solid and wouldn't spread a lot. Here are before- and after-baking shots of the domes:



And here's a close up of a cookie... The chopped walnuts were about the same colour as the rice crispies, but they're both there:

Coffee caramel crisps

Before today, it had been about three months since I last baked. There was just no drive or interest until out of the blue, I felt the desire to make something easy and delicious. My only condition was that whatever I made had to use coffee (no idea why) so I found a recipe and modified it to fit my requirement.

Here's a picture of the finished cookie:


And here's the recipe...

• Coffee caramel crisps
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• 1 3/4 call-purpose flour
• 1/4 calmonds, finely chopped
• 1/4 cground coffee beans
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• 3/4 cunsalted butter
• 1 cgranulated sugar
• 1 tspvanilla extract
• 2 Tbspsoy milk
• 1 Tbsphoney
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• Sift flour. Mix in ground coffee beans and almonds. Set flour mixture aside.
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• Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla, milk, and honey and mix well. Fold flour mixture into batter and mix. Chill dough for at least 30 minutes.
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• Dust working surface with flour and roll out a portion of chilled dough to 1/8" thickness. Cut shapes with cookie cutter and place 1" apart on lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12 minutes.
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The 1 c sugar and 1 Tbsp honey were a substitute for 1 c brown sugar, which I had forgotten to pick up after baking honey cupcakes. I found a really neat app on my iPod Touch called Food Sub and it has helped me make numerous substitutions, but I can't seem to locate it in iTunes at the moment for some reason.

Anyway, the most time consuming parts of this baking project were when I chopped up the almonds and when I was cutting the cookies. I poured out two handfuls of whole almonds onto a chopping board, which appeared to be about 1/2 c. However, it ended up being 1/4 c once chopped. This amount seemed to be just perfect - not too much crunch and not too little either. As for rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies, I found chilling the dough helped immensely because it needed to be relatively stiff to cut and transfer onto the cookie sheet without ruining the shape. If I didn't have the patience to use a cookie cutter, I could have rolled the dough into a log, frozen it, and then sliced it for a haphazard look. My scalloped round cutter gave the cookie a nice, elegant finish and I wouldn't change a thing next time.

Here is a picture of the cookie dough, which smelled like coffee ice cream and tasted just as heavenly:


And here are a few of the cookies resting on a cooling rack: