Cream Cheese Cookies!

Here in Virginia, we've been having crazy heat!   The entire house has been so hot, I haven't had much motivation to heat up the house even more by turning on the oven.  Curt and I are going to Boston and Maine to visit some friends, so I decided to bake some cookies to bring them.  Since we were going out of town, I didn't have much in the fridge.  I had a block of cream cheese and some butter, but no eggs, so I set out to find a recipe without eggs. 

After perusing my favorite website Allrecipes.com, I found a good recipe for Cream Cheese Snowball Cookies.  Here we go!

CREAM CHEESE COOKIES

* 1 cup confectioners' sugar

* 1/2 cup finely-chopped walnuts (optional)

* 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (such as Crisco®)

* 1/2 cup butter, softened

* 1/2 cup cream cheese, softened

* 1/2 cup white sugar

*1/2 teaspoon almond extract

* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

*1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

So, first things first.  I decided to double the recipe since I needed to make a bunch of cookies.  Plus, if I had just made 1 batch, I would have half a brick of cream cheese left and half a stick of shortening and would just be a big mess and that just wouldn't do!  

I threw the cream cheese, butter, and shortening in the stand mixer and let it whirl while I got the rest of the ingredients together. 

I added in the flour, sugar, vanilla, and almond extract.  The dough seemed too runny, so I wanted to thicken it up a bit.  Rather than just add more flour, I decided to get creative.

The original recipe called for the finished cookies to be rolled in powdered sugar and walnuts.  I thought that was a good idea, but it seemed too Christmasy... since it's July, I made a little change.

  I swapped almonds for the walnuts and toasted then in a dry pan.  When you toast any nut, the heat activates the oils, which gives the nuts a great flavor. 

Once the almonds were all nice and brown, I ground them up in my little mini food processor.  It just took a few minutes to turn the tan slivers into fine little almond crumbs.  YUM!

I added in the ground almonds to thicken up the dough a bit.  Luckily, it seemed to do the trick.  I then covered a cookie sheet with some aluminum foil and sprayed it with cooking spray. 

 Next, I rolled the dough into little cookie balls.  I wanted to make the cookies pretty small and bite sized, so the dough balls were pretty small.  I just rolled it between my hands and plopped them down on the cookie sheet about an  1 1/2 inch apart.

I stuck the cookies in the oven for about 8 minutes per batch.  The cookies looked adorable.  They had spread out a bit, and were slightly browned at the edges which is just the way I like them. 

The original recipe said that you should roll the cookies in a mixture of the ground walnuts and the powdered sugar.  I didn't really think it through when I started the cookies, so I tried making a chocolate mixture to roll the cookies in. 

They turned out to be pretty tasty, but they didn't look all that cute.  I decided to try them plain.

They were ok plain too.  I had a TON of cookies, so I took a few and brought them into the restaurant where I work.  They only lasted a few minutes before they were gobbled up.  I did decide to jazz the rest of them up with some frosting and sprinkles!

 

So these final little cookie bites were delicious!  The cookies themselves weren't all that sweet, so the icing added a nice bit of sugar and fun.  I think that I will definitely have to make these again!  Our friends loved them too!