Josh: Today we have a special guest with us! Abbie is home from college for the holidays and she’s helping us take photographs of our work.
Kandice: She is also going to be our official taste tester for this week! (whispers) Hopefully she doesn’t die…
Josh: Anyways …
Kandice: Oh yeah! Well, in the spirit of Christmas Josh and I decided to make something festive. Earlier in the week, we had decided upon making cookies and hot coco for “Santa”, but weren’t sure on what type of cookies we wanted to make.
Josh: We didn’t want to make any old, ordinary holiday cookies. We wanted to make something that would remind people of the warmth of Christmas but also have a little pizzazz to them.
Kandice: So we decided to make Carrot Cake Cookies with Cream Cheese Icing!
Josh: We know that it’s a little unusual, but we both love carrot cake! And the idea of making carrot cake into cookies made our mouths water. So we went ahead with the idea.
Kandice: Since we were doing something different for the cookies, we also decided that it’d be a good idea to try something different with the hot chocolate as well.
Kandice: This week I’ll be explaining how Josh and I created the cookies. I will also be posting about the hot chocolate that I made from scratch! Yumm…
Carrot Cake Cookies
Ingredients:
½ cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 (8 ounce) can crushed pineapple, drained
¾ cup shredded carrots
1 cup raisins
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Kandice: I’ve made a lot of cookies throughout my years but I’ve never once run across a recipe for carrot cake cookies. So when Josh and I came up with this idea I was very excited to see how they would turn out. I’m a huge fan of carrot cake so I was worried that the cookies wouldn’t have the same texture and flavoring as carrot cake does. It’s true that it doesn’t have the exact texture of regular carrot cake, but the cookies that Josh and I made were great!
The first thing we did was to take soften butter and cream it together with the brown sugar. This turned out to be a lot of sugar because Josh and I were making three batches of cookies (enough for Josh’s, Abbie’s and my family).
Tip: Here’s a little tip for all soon-to-be-bakers out there; make sure that you let your butter warm to room temp so that it’s soft and easy to work with. Using cold, hard butter is a big “baking no-no”.
The next project to do was to prep the carrots. Josh helped by peeling the outer skin off the carrots, which then went into my food processor to be finely chopped. This, along with the eggs, was then added to the sugar mixture. In another bowl I mixed together the remaining ingredients except the raisins and pineapple. Josh then helped me combine the two mixtures together. We got so messy and full of flour because we added the ingredients together too fast. So remember to take things slow!
Some people may know this but most don’t … I’m a little picky when it comes to my carrot cake. I don’t like having any raisins or “extras” in it. So when the recipe called for raisins and pineapple, I made a funny face and cringed. Josh laughed at this and agreed that we would make the three different batches into three difference recipes. For the first batch we added the pineapple to 1/3 of the batter. The second 3rd of the batter we added craisins to it. (We forgot to buy raisins and I only had craisins at home so we made do.) The last of the batter we left alone … my favorite!
All these cookies we then baked in the oven at 350 degrees F for approximately 15 – 20 minutes.
Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons baking coco
½ cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
3 cups milk
½ tablespoon creamy peanut butter
Kandice: While Josh and I were baking the cookies I worked on making a modified version of my uncle’s recipe for hot chocolate. I, myself, have never made hot chocolate from scratch before but my uncle had shown me what to do. I found out that it’s not that hard to make homemade hot coco.
Cream Cheese Icing
Ingredients:
4 ounces unsalted butter, softened
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Josh: This week, I worked on the easy part. Between peeling the carrots, getting some prep work done, and showing Abbie how to use my new camera so that she could take some pictures, I really only got around to making the Cream Cheese Icing. We got the recipe from Food Networks website, and it is amazing, to say the least.
The recipe within itself is very very simple, and also versitile. I first added the unsalted butter and cream cheese to the bowl. As Kandice said earlier, Please make sure that the butter is softened. If you're working with still cold butter, things will get ugly fast. Anyway. After creaming those two ingredients together, I added the powdered sugar to the mix slowly. I put the sugar in about 1/2 of a cup at a time, until it was all in and the icing was getting nice and creamy.
Here's where the versitility of the icing comes in. The recipe calls for vanilla extract, which makes an awesome icing, but you can really put in whatever flavorings you want. I just recently made lemon icing for some holiday cookies at home, and it turned out fantastic.
And after that, all there is left to do is to pipe your icing onto the cookies, or just dunk em' right in. You can also store the icing in bags, or closed containers, and throw it right into the fridge.
So that's how we spent the evening. With sleep deprivation and sugar highs, basically. We really hope that you will try these recipes for yourselves and tell us what you think! You can find the recipies we used on foodnetwork.com, and allrecipes.com. Also, please feel more than free to comment on our posts, or send us comments and suggestions at our e-mail: jkdailyspecial@gmail.com. Please check back in for more Daily Specials!
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