Educating Risa

Earlier in the week the boys gave me a hand making some cookies, based on the “Sugared Black Raspberry Tea Cookies” recipe on allrecipes.com.  Here’s our version:

RASPBERRY THUMBPRINT COOKIES

1/2 c margarine or butter

1/4 c packed brown sugar

1/4 c white sugar

1 tsp vanilla

3 Tbsp milk (we use unsweetened almond milk)

1 1/3 c white flour (we use unbleached)

1/4 c cornstarch

1/4 c mini chocolate chips (semi-sweet)

3 Tbsp sugar (we like ‘sugar in the raw’)

raspberry jam (or pomegranate jelly when you run out of jam!) to fill thumbprints

Preheat oven to 375F. Cream margarine, sugars and vanilla until fluffy. Stir in milk, flour and cornstarch. Mix in chocolate chips. Place the 3 Tbsp sugar in a separate small bowl. Roll dough into small balls (a bit smaller than a golf ball) with your hands, then roll around in sugar to coat, and place on cookie sheet. Make an indentation with your thumb; fill with jam. Bake 13 minutes.

Here’s the boys doing the rolling and sugaring (I pinched off appropriately sized blobs of dough and put them on the counter for them):

Now, to make the thumbprints (other digits work too!):

And finally, hamming it up while enjoying the fruits of our labours. You should have seen them AFTER the sugar rush!

We don’t make these cookies often, as they have pretty much no nutritional value whatsoever, but they were a nice way to mark our “just Mom and the boys” week we just had with Jim away at a conference in Redmond (Seattle). They are good at Christmas or Thanksgiving as well.