Carrot Cake Cookies

I should never have made these cookies. It was a very bad idea, and now I’m stuck with having eaten them. Ordinarily, I bake cookies and happily share them because they’re just cookies. Not so with these babies. Carrot cake cookies sandwiched together with cream cheese frosting do not get shared so much as they get devoured very, very quickly. These are from Martha Stewart's Cookies, and as I’ve said before, every cookie in that book looks similarly devourable.

These have all the things a carrot cake might have like grated fresh carrots, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and raisins. For no particular reason, I reduced the amount of raisins and added some chopped pecans. I guess if there were a reason, it would be that my favorite carrot cake recipe has nuts in it so I wanted some in these cookies too. Since they get sandwiched, it’s convenient if they’re all the same size. I used a small ice cream scoop to place the dough on the baking sheets in even-sized mounds. The recipe suggests chilling the dough before scooping, but chilled dough is more difficult to spoon out of the bowl. So, I placed the dough mounds on sheets, and then chilled the baking sheets before putting them in the oven.

The cream cheese frosting is basic, straightforward, and as delicious as it always is. Once these were filled with frosting and finished, I realized this would be the first cookie I would prefer to eat from the refrigerator. This is interesting because Kurt is a cold cookie kind of guy. Even chocolate chip. He prefers them straight from the refrigerator, and I don’t understand it. For me, chocolate chip cookies are only worth eating directly from the oven. The refrigerator doesn’t even enter the picture. But here, cream cheese frosting necessitates refrigeration. I can tell you that these are by far my favorite cold cookie, and I have many, many extra calories to burn this week.

Brown Sugar Pound Cake

Sweets: Soul Food Desserts and Memories is a gem of a book. Anecdotes included throughout the book clearly convey the warmth, happiness, and fun shared among an extended family and their community. The author has written about the women in her family, what excellent cooks they were, and how well known they were for their sweets. These ladies took equal pride in the orderliness of their homes and the quality of their desserts. There are so many desserts that I wanted to make as soon as I read about them. The meringue topped banana pudding, the peach cobbler, and the strawberry layer cake are all on my short list. But, the first cake I had to have was the brown sugar pound cake. This cake came from the author’s maternal grandmother.

I made just a couple of alterations to the ingredient list. I used all butter rather than a combination of butter and shortening, and I used AP flour since I didn’t have any cake flour on hand. Then, for the frosting, I used natural maple syrup instead of maple extract. The flour and baking powder get sifted together three times. The sifting process along with the five eggs in the recipe, ensure an amazing texture for this cake. It was impossible for it to be anything but fantastic, and well, it was just that.

As Kurt and I tasted our first pieces of the cake, we both just nodded in agreement. Wow. It was a buttery, brown sugary, pecan-filled, just really, really good pound cake with cream cheese, maple frosting. Read this book if you get a chance, and try this brown sugar pound cake. I can very highly recommend both.