It’s holiday baking season!!! The best time of the year!!!

Yeah yeah, I have been nonexistent on this bad boy for a majority of the year, but that’s life! When you buy a house, change jobs AND find out you’re pregnant, my little passion project that is this blog seems to go to the backburner. Or, well, into storage, where it gathered a lot of dust and you only remember it when you’re busting out the Christmas decorations mid-November…

All of this being said, I’m going to do my best to post on here as often as I can! Seeing as I am no longer working in a bakery, I actually miss doing it a lot! I’m no longer drained from 2am wake ups, my feet don’t hurt from standing on them all day long in a bakeshop, and I actually have true weekends now, so I’m going to enjoy this life as long as I can until the baby boy comes in February, and get back into this wonderful world of baking!

Now that y’all are up to speed with my personal life, let’s talk COOKIES! I love a cookie, especially a holiday one. The flavors are incredibly inviting, the options are endless, and they are simple. That’s exactly what I love around the holidays. You can bake up a million different types of cookies, fill platters with them, gift them, bake them all day long and feel accomplished, plus, they’re easy! Sure, if you’re hand cutting them and decorating them with piped icing, that takes some time, but overall, they’re the most loving and forgiving of desserts!

I first made these chai spiced snickerdoodles for my work Halloween party (and won 1stprize I might add!) and decorated them with some buttercream and spooky eyes for that mummy look. When I put these out, all I could think of was uhhh HOLIDAY COOKIE STAPLE! They’re soft, they’re filled with the perfect blend of spices, they’re cozy, I could go on. These chai spiced snickerdoodles are also light enough to not give you that belly ache when you eat a few after dinner, or for a snack…see, perfection.

The recipe is a nice creamed cookie method, and you have TOTAL control over what spices are added! Also, black pepper? Yep—that’s in chai! So it’s in these babies, too. If you want more or less of something, of course, that’s up to you and your taste buds. Also, the chocolate drizzle is another optional addition to these, but it’s a nice touch to the sweet outside of the cookie to put something slightly rich yet not overwhelming on them, so I promise that you won’t regret that drizzle!

WELL! Happy holiday baking season, let’s spend this next month turning up in the kitchen, belting out your favorite holiday tunes, putting lights in every open space, and just being full of joy and happiness (and cookies…)!

ingredients

Butter—13 oz, or 1 ½ C

Brown Sugar—8 oz, or 1 C

Eggs—2

Vanilla—2 tsp

Flour—15 oz, or 3 C

Baking Soda—1 tsp

Baking Powder—1 tsp

Salt—½ tsp

Cinnamon—2 tsp

Black Pepper—1 tsp

Maca Powder (optional)—1 tsp

Sugar—½ C

Cinnamon—1 ½ TBL

Ginger—1 tsp

Cloves—½ tsp

Nutmeg—1 tsp

Black Pepper—¼ tsp

Semisweet Chocolate—8 oz, melted

process

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add in the eggs and vanilla, and mix until combined. Scraping down the sides of the bowl is necessary for this step.

In a separate bowl, sift together all of the dry ingredients (from flour-maca powder).

With the mixer on low, slowly add in the dry ingredients to the creamed ingredients.

Mix until combined, scraping down when needed.

Wrap and transfer cookie dough into the refrigerator for a couple of hours.

When you are ready to bake cookies, preheat your oven to 350 F.

In a small bowl, combine the sugar and spices.

Roll your cookie dough into 1.5 oz balls, or about 2 TBL worth of dough—of course you can make these as small or as large as you’d like!

Roll each ball into the sugar spice mixture and place on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat or sprayed with nonstick spray.

Bake cookies 12-15 minutes. They will be slightly browned on the edges, with a nice soft center, this will be what keeps them so soft.

Place on a cooling rack until ready to coat in chocolate.

When you are ready to drizzle chocolate on these cookies, melt your chocolate (I like a nice 70%-80%) either in the microwave or in a double boiler over the stove.

To drizzle, you may either use a piping bag, a spatula or a spoon to drizzle as much or as little chocolate as you’d like over these cookies.

Allow to cool before storing. These can be stored at room temperature up to a week!

Recipe makes 2 dozen cookies.

Bon Appétit!

Ever have those days when you’re just craving a Poptart-like breakfast pastry? And then you realize that as an almost-26 year old you really shouldn’t be ooing and ahhing over all of the varieties in that aisle, that maybe you should just be picking up your fruit and yogurt, and leaving the store as quickly as possible.

Yes. That happens to me almost every time that I am in the supermarket. I go up and down the aisle that has Oreos (obviously need to see if there are any new flavors!), and then peak at the Poptarts, thinking maybe it will be the day that I cave, the day when I buy Cinnamon Brown Sugar, S’more and Strawberry Poptarts.

It has yet to happen.

Then I made this wild discovery—I may be skilled enough to make my own Poptarts at home, I mean culinary school should have prepared me for this exact adult moment, am I right? And naturally I’m going to make something a little different, a combination that I am pretty sure I can’t find sitting in a box between the ever so delicious S’mores and Blueberry flavors.

Cue the nuts and spices.

First, making your own chai spice blend is ever so easy, read ingredients below, but I used some from Easy Indian that are so authentic and fragrant—highly recommend! Second, nuts are always optional, but unless you have allergies I really do not suggest omitting them. The added crunch and the toasted flavor really elevate the pastry as a whole, giving them just a few more taste points in my book.

Finally, the pie dough and assembly are what take the most time and have the most steps. Rolling, cutting, chilling, assembling, chilling, egg washing, chilling, baking. Can you tell that chilling the dough and the temperature is very important?! While they are not the most complicated, a bit of patience is required if you want to achieve the most flakey, most buttery, most yummy and most aesthetically pleasing pastry—which is why I have provided very detailed steps and photos, I suggest reading all of the steps before starting!

Literally perfect for ANY time of the day…which just means for me I need to run an extra mile or go to an extra spin class this week in order to feel slightly less bad about eating more of these Poptarts in a day than I probably have in my life!

dough ingredients

Flour—6.75 oz, or 1 ¼ C

Sugar—0.25 oz, or ½ TBL

Salt—½ tsp

Cinnamon—1 tsp

Butter, cold—4 oz, or 1 stick/8 TBL

Milk—2 oz, or ¼ C

Water, cold—1 oz, or ¼ C

process

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon.

Cut up the butter into hazelnut sized cubes and add to the flour mixture.

Using your hands, a pastry cutter or a fork, rub the butter into the flour mixture until combined.

Slowly add in your cold milk and water, kneading with your hands or a spatula until you have formed a dough ball.

Wrap tightly in plastic and chill until you are ready to use.

filling ingredients

Brown Sugar—4 oz, or ½ C

Chai Spices*—0.25 oz, or 1 TBL

Chopped Almonds, toasted—1.5 oz, or ¼ C

Milk—0.5 oz, or 1 TBL

Egg, beaten—1

process

In a bowl, combine the brown sugar, spices and chopped almonds.

*I used Easy Indian Chai Spice, but to make your own—2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp each of allspice, cardamom, cloves, ginger, black pepper!*

Add in the milk and mix to combine.

Your mixture should resemble slightly wet sand; this just helps it stay together when you are filling your pastry!

turnover assembly

Take your dough out of the refrigerator and put on a lightly floured work surface.

Roll your dough out until it is about ¼“ thick.

*To make sure that you get a nice and even dough when rolling, rotate 45˚ after every pass of your rolling pin, making sure that there is enough flour underneath and it is not sticking.*

Once you have rolled out your dough, using either a fluted pastry wheel or regular pizza cutter, cut out rectangles that are 3” x 1½”.

This should make about 6 sets.

Once you have finished cutting out the rectangles, place them on a baking sheet covered with either parchment or a Silpat in the refrigerator to chill.

Preheat your oven to 350˚ F.

You should have 6 bottoms and 6 tops—egg wash the bottoms completely, this will help your filling stay in place better.

Take about 2 TBL of the filling and place it in the middle of your bottom rectangle.

Egg wash the edges of the top pastry and place wash side down on your filling.

Crimp the edges with a fork so that the top and bottom pastry stick together.

Chill for about 5 minutes in the refrigerator.

When you are ready to bake, poke air holes in the top so that your pastry can vent, egg wash the top, and sprinkle coarse sugar on top.

Bake in your preheated oven for about 20 minutes, until golden brown.

Remove from the oven onto a cooling rack

Bon Appétit!