Baketober: Hearty S'mores Cookies

Here’s the first edition of Baketober for 2013!

I decided to kick it off with a creation that is simple, sweet and inspired by my recent American adventures: hearty s'mores cookies.

S'mores are an American classic, they’re pretty basic: chocolate and marshmallow sandwiched between graham crackers (sweet biscuits such as Arnott’s Marie biscuits). Apparently, the name is a contraction of ‘some more’ which is cute, given how Americans seem to make fun of Aussies and our love of shortening words and phrases!

This is really very simple, they’re not particularly healthy but something sweet now and then never hurt anyone, right? Plus, I think they’d be a great dessert pleaser if you’re holding a dinner party...

Basic Info

Prep time: 35 mins

Cooking time: 25 mins

Makes 10 very large cookies; you can make the cookies smaller for a larger quantity.

Ingredients

For the chocolate heart cookies:

180g unsalted butter, at room temperature

¾ cup brown sugar

1 egg

½ tsp vanilla essence

1 ½ cups plain flour

½ cup cocoa powder

Note: this makes a lot of cookies, you’ll have plenty left over as stand alone cookies or you can freeze the left over dough for a future batch!

For the cookie base:

1 cup sweet biscuit crumbs (e.g. Arnott’s Marie, Graham Crackers etc)

1 ¼ cups plain flour

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

125g unsalted butter, room temperature

½ cup brown sugar

1/3 cup caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

Marshmallows, as many as you require depending on the number of cookies you’re making

Recipe

To make the chocolate heart cookies:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

2. Cream butter and sugar together.

3. Beat in the egg and vanilla essence, until well combined.

4. Add flour and cocoa powder and mix well.

5. Roll up the dough, place in some cling wrap and store in the freezer for 15-20 mins, while you begin making the cookie base. I find that colder cookie dough makes it easier to roll out and cut shapes from.

6. Roll out the cold dough and use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to create the hearts.

7. Place hearts on baking tray and bake for 15 minutes. These cookies won’t enlarge in size, so you can keep them quite close to each other on the baking tray.

To make the cookie base:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.

2. Combine the crackers, flour, baking soda and salt - set aside.

3. In a separate bowl, beat the butter, brown sugar and caster sugar together until well combined.

4. Add in the egg and vanilla extract to this butter/sugar mixture.

5. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and mix well.

6. Take spoonfuls of the mixture into your hand, roll them into flat balls the size you require and place on baking tray.

7. Bake for 8 minutes, the cookies should start to brown lightly. These cookies will enlarge quite a lot in size, so make sure to keep plenty of room between each cookie.

8. Take them out of the oven and press a marshmallow into the centre of each cookie. Leave to cool completely.

9. Place the cookies with the marshmallows back into the oven, bake for 2-3 minutes until the tips of the marshmallows are very lightly toasted. 

10. With the cookies out of the oven, lightly push a heart cookie into the top of each marshmallow.

And ta-da, that’s it! I adapted a combination of this and this recipe to come to my own. I hope you find them just as cute as I do. I’ve had too many since making them yesterday afternoon, I really think I need to start giving some away… who wants one?

Don’t forget to use #baketober via Twitter/Facebook/Instagram so I can see what goodies you’re baking up this month! Or you can leave me a link to your blog post. Happy baking y'all!