Almond Vanilla Cookie Sandwiches

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a slight mishap with the icing for the Cherry Coke Birthday cake.....  I accidentally doubled the amount of sugar necessary for the icing.  That mistake may not sound like a big deal (I mean, who doesn't like extra sweet icing?) but sugar does a great deal more in a recipe than simply sweeten....

Because there was too much sugar, the icing was runny & soupy instead of light and fluffy.  I didn't want to throw away the faulty icing and start completely over.  So, I decided the best course of action was to double the other ingredients & turn the batch of icing into a GIANT batch of icing.

After icing my birthday cake and the cupcakes, I was still left with a great deal of icing.  I froze some of it for a future baking adventure and used the remainder to make these cookie sandwiches.  While the icing does have some cherry coke & grenadine in it, the overall flavor of those ingredients is more subtle.  Cherry/almond and cherry/vanilla are classic flavor combinations, and these cookie sandwiches combine hints of all those flavors.

To create the cookies, I modified a snickerdoodle cookie recipe.  I removed the cinnamon from the original recipe and instead added vanilla and almond extracts.  The dough could further be adapted to include other extracts and flavorings or even citrus zests (I think lemon might be particularly nice).

The end result?  A slightly crunchy, yet chewy sweet treat with hints of vanilla and cherry.

p.s If you follow me on Instagram, you can see my unfortunate mishap while photographing these cookies. My reflecting board fell over and, of course, it landed in the middle of the icing :(  Oh well.... At least it happened at the end.


Almond Vanilla Cookie Sandwiches
makes approximately 30 cookies, or 15 sandwiches 


4 oz (1 stick) Unsalted Butter, softened
4.5 oz Granulated Sugar, plus additional for rolling
1 Egg
1/2 tsp Almond Extract
3/4 tsp Vanilla Extract
6.25 oz AP Flour
2g Baking Soda
Pinch Sea Salt
leftover Icing, as needed for sandwiching

1.  Preheat oven to 350 F.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2.  Cream together the butter and sugar until the mixture is fully combined, has lightened in color, and increased in volume

3.  Add the egg & extracts. Beat until combined.

4.  In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, soda and salt.

5.  Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and mix until just combined.

6.  Using a small cookie scoop (mine is a number 70, which is about 1 Tbl or 0.5 oz in capacity), make equal rounds of dough.  Roll each piece of dough in additional granulated sugar.

7.  Place the sugared dough rounds onto the prepared baking sheet.  Keep the dough in rounds if you prefer more chewy cookies (like cookies pictured in this post) or flatten if you prefer more crunchy cookies.

8.  Bake in preheated oven for approximately 10 minutes.  Allow to cool on baking sheet for 3 minutes before moving to a wire rack to cool completely.

9.  Once cookies have completely cooled, pipe or spread icing onto the bottoms of half the cookies.  Top with remaining cookies.