Kitchen Sink Cookies by Claire

I love so much when kids and teens show a passion for cooking or baking. Cooking and baking skills are becoming sort of a lost art these days and when my colleague Sarah brought on her 12 year-old daughter, Claire, on a video call we were having to show off her cookie sheet full of freshly baked cookies, I was beyond impressed.

Claire Baking

I’ve known about Claire’s love of baking for a while and it stems from her grandma, Chris, who’s an amazing baker. My passion for baking also comes from my grandma, so this little lady and her Kitchen Sink Cookies hit close to home for me.

Claire shared the recipe she used, Kitchen Sink Cookies (Panera Copycat), by popular food blogger, Melissa at Design N Eat Repeat and I’m adding it to my repertoire to try over the weekend.

Kitchen Sink Cookies

Here’s to all the young cooks and bakers out there!

Cheers,

Veronique

Brown Sugar Crackle Top Cookies

Brown Sugar Crackle Top Cookies

I was recently invited to a holiday cookie exchange party where I had to bring dozens of cookies to swap with other ladies. While I have many delicious cookie recipes on the blog, I wanted to challenge myself with trying a new recipe that would yield several dozen cookies.

I came across a recipe that yields four dozen cookies by blogger, Bake or Break, for Brown Sugar Crinkle Cookies. I have a great recipe for Chocolate Crackle-Top Cookies, that I love, but brown sugar cookies!!?? I was in!

This is a link to the recipe: https://bakeorbreak.com/2012/04/brown-sugar-crinkles/

While I followed the instructions, I did use a 1 ½-inch ice cream scoop vs the 1-inch version proposed in the recipe. Because of this, the recipe yielded 40 cookies, vs 48.

Toasting the chopped pecans made a huge difference in how nutty the cookies tasted, don’t skip that step!

Don’t overbeat the batter, mix until the dough comes together then manually fold in the pecan pieces with a wooden spoon or spatula. Again, mix until the pecans are just incorporated.

Letting the dough chill in the fridge prior to scooping into balls is critical here so that the cookies hold their shape and don’t go flat and spread too much. I gave mine 45 minutes in the fridge.

When possible, I like to bake one cookie sheet at a time, which I did here also as I had a leisurely day to do the baking. I just think cookies bake more evenly that way. I totally get that it’s not always feasible though.

As the cookies were a little bigger than what was prescribed in the recipe, I baked them for 13 minutes and they were perfect.

Can’t imagine one person who wouldn’t love getting a box of these precious and delicious cookies for the holidays.

Happy baking! Veronique