Carrot Cake Cookies: The World’s Best Vehicle for Cream Cheese Icing

Carrot Cake Cookies: The World’s Best Vehicle for Cream Cheese Icing

I know, empirically, that carrot cake doesn’t count as a serving of vegetables. Or that an incredibly huge slice doesn’t count as two servings of vegetables. I think we all do.

Yet I still have a vague sense that it’s somehow wholesome and good for me, even though my best recipe for carrot cake calls for a whole cup of mayonnaise. A wholesome, somehow good-for-me-excuse to eat frosting in front of company, because it seems bad manners to shovel it in my mouth with a spoon.

Rosemary in My Cookies?!

Rosemary in My Cookies?!

Wait.. what? Rosemary… cookies? Okay, I gotta try this. So with a function coming up that I needed to provide some nibbles for, I decided these cookies were sufficiently fancy enough to make. I was a little skeptical at first, after all rosemary, my most favorite herb of all time was supposed to be put in savory dishes, not cookies!

Cardamom Green Tea Butter Cookies

Cardamom Green Tea Butter Cookies

Sometimes, when no one is looking, I open the spice cabinet in my kitchen, pull out the cardamom, and sniff it. It is one of my favorite smells in the world – better than vanilla beans and lilacs. And that’s saying something, don’t you think?

As for matcha, I have been obsessed with green tea flavored foods for at least a decade now. It started with the palest tinted bowl of sushi-house ice cream in my early days and has been a love affair ever since.

Nilla Failures

Nilla Failures

So off to the kitchen my tot and I went. Me to find the surprisingly few ingredients I needed and him in the hoped of stirring something and licking a spoon. I mixed the dough, rolled it out into long tubes, gave my son a beater paddle and kept one for myself, stuck the cookie snake in the freezer and promptly forgot about it for a few hours.