Sandwich Cookie Recipe

Yesterday, we had 12 guests over for dinner. I prepared the entire meal but wasn't planning to make a dessert, except for a large platter of fresh fruit. When everyone had finished their plate, my father-in-law, Daddy, said: "now let's head to the other room and have the desserts Jackie made!" I tried to whisper to him that there were none, but it was too late.

So I ran into the kitchen and whipped up with these sandwich cookies. I only needed 12 minutes to bake them and used fresh strawberries I luckily had in the refrigerator for the filling. Everyone was still enjoying their coffee and tea when my dessert was ready to be served. I could have waited a bit more for the cookies to cool and get firm but I think they were still enjoyable. Mission accomplished!

Snickerdoodles: Cinnamon Sugar Cookies (+Giveaway)

Snickerdoodles are perfect during this holiday season. They're just as delicious as plain sugar cookies, but with a touch of freshly ground cinnamon. The cookie dough is rolled into small dough balls and then rolled in cinnamon sugar. Once they're nicely coated, the cookies are flattened, and when they're baked, a whimsical, crinkled cinnamon top is formed.

What makes this batch of cookies very special is the use of Bourbon Barrel Foods smoked salt, smoked sugar and pure vanilla extract. It turned out to be a marvelous choice as it added another dimension to the Christmas cookies.

If you want to try out this recipe, head over to BourbonBarrelFoods.com. Their products are some of the best new ingredients I’ve tried in a long time, and I highly recommend them for your sweet and savory cooking. And today only, you have a chance to win an assortment of Bourbon Barrel products by entering on the 25 Days of Giveaways page.

Make sure you're a fan of PhamFatale Facebook fan page and Bourbon Barrel Foods or follow @Phamfatalecom and tweet about this giveaway. To make it easy, you can just copy and paste this tweet if you’d like: "BBF Holiday Package #Giveaway from @Phamfatalecom and @BourbonBarrel: http://bit.ly/sp4V7y".

Halloween Cookies: Dried Fruit Cookie Recipe

I read this morning in the news that the White House held a pre-Halloween party that included cookies and dried fruit today. It inspired me to make a batch of dried fruit cookies for our own festivities. I mixed raisins, dried cherries, dried kiwis, dried apricots, honey and pecans into a basic sugar cookie dough. I made a fair number that I kept in an airtight tin so the kids can enjoy them all the way through to Monday evening.

The cookies are decorated with very cute renditions of Dracula and a spooky witch. The designs are in the form of peel-&-press edible frosting stickers, which were very convenient, given my utter lack of drawing skills. If you'd like to get similar designs, you can find them at Ticings®. They come in thin sheets of edible icing using food-grade inks that easy apply to almost any soft-frosted dessert.

Our team at PhamFatale.com has worked hard and has prepared almost $1,000-worth of giveaways for the month of December just for you. Ticings® will be part of it, so you can add holiday art to your classic baking. Stay tuned!

Halloween Cookies: Mint Sugar Cookie Recipe

Last year, children wouldn't touch my Halloween-themed witch finger shortbread cookies and ghost cupcakes. They were just too scary! With Halloween right around the corner, I’m determined not to make the same mistake again. I can’t think of anything as innocent sounding as sugar cookies, but this time I made them with the appropriate level of spookiness: I shaped them as little pumpkins.

I made the cookie dough with both butter and oil in addition to fromage blanc (you could use sour cream). This made the cookies oh-so-moist and chewy with a sparkly crust (I sprinkled them with green and orange-tinted sanding sugar). Instead of making plain vanilla sugar cookies, I flavored the cookie dough with mint julep sugar from Bourbon Barrel. You could substitute your favorite flavorings.

Banana Almond Butterscotch Cookies

Butterscotch, freeze-dried banana chips and sliced almonds may not be the first ingredients to come to mind when making cookies, but they work incredibly well together. The crunch of the almonds and bananas is a great foil to the soft and creamy butterscotch chips. To reinforce the flavors, I added banana extract to the brown sugar cookie dough. The cookies taste fantastic, right out of the oven.

If you have a little extra time on your hands, make an extra batch so you can freeze the cookie dough for later use. We had some surprise company for tea this weekend, so I needed to whip up a plate of cookies. I just pulled out a log from the freezer, cut it into discs and popped them in the oven. They taste so much better than store-bought cookies, and when you pull them out of the oven, ooey gooey and piping hot, you'll look like an absolute rockstar!