sunday sharing – amanda’s s’mores cookies

i’m back with another recipe inspired by marshmallow-evil-genius amandabear. she’s up to no good, i tell you! she recently posted an adorable and delicious-sounding illustrated recipe on her blog for s’mores cookies, and i immediately bookmarked it (and you should too!). her original inspiration came from this recipe, which she then tinkered with slightly, and illustrated. i am a sucker for recipes that are comprised of things i happen to have in my house already, so i was pretty psyched when i realized i had everything in my pantry. i followed up with amanda to clarify one question i had about the graham crackers (it’s 4 “full” rectangle sheets of graham crackers, FYI), and then i got to baking!

i pretty much followed amanda’s version to the letter, with the following notes: for the graham crackers, i broke up about half of them into “bite-size-ish” pieces and then used the beaters to incorporate them with the rest of the batter. then, i did the same routine with the other half of them, but just folded those in with a wooden spoon, so that they wouldn’t get broken up too small.

and, a note about chopping up the dandies: HOLY GOOD GRACIOUS I WANTED TO STAB MYSELF IN THE EAR WHILE I WAS DOING THIS PART. i had the ‘jumbo’ dandies in the house, but i wasn’t sure if i’d have quite enough (plus, they weren’t super fresh), so erik sweetly volunteered to go grab me another bag from whole foods. yay! so nice! i got started on the rest of the ingredients, and at some point he showed up with my fresh bag of jumbo dandies. well, i grabbed one, along with a sharp paring knife, and set out to chop it into about 8 pieces. from the get-go, this was an entirely futile endeavor. i could have recorded the entire thing and set it to benny hill music and it would have gone viral. marshmallow piece stuck to the knife, then stuck to my thumb, then stuck to the knife, then stuck to my fingernail, then stuck to the top edge of the measuring cup, then stuck to the knife again… it took me something like five minutes just to get the FIRST chopped-up marshmallow off of my person and into the measuring cup. i thought i would go out of my mind. i switched back to the older bag of dandies, hoping they’d be slightly less sticky, and that did help a little, but it was still pretty torturous. plus, then i ran out of those and had to go back to the fresh ones anyway. and then i was worried about incorporating them into the batter, because i didn’t want them to just reconstitute into one or two ginormous marshmallow clumps. it was an ordeal, is what i’m saying.

as i was recounting this story to erik later that evening, he said, “well they had mini dandies at the store, i could have just bought those.” you could have heard a pin drop in my kitchen. so yep, i will most definitely be buying dandies in the mini size for future batches of s’mores cookies. whew!

anyhow, here’s how they looked after my valiant marshmallow-chopping battle, on their way into the oven:

and here’s how they looked right after they came out of the oven:

…and here’s how they looked as they were cooling on a rack and i was about to shove one in my face!

i took these to school on the first day, because two of my TAs were celebrating birthdays that week, and i always bring treats for their birthdays. (more on that next week, because i also brought something else.) anyhow, they went over really well, and the recipe made enough that we also had plenty to keep at home for ourselves. these are pretty sweet little buggers, and they go really nicely with a glass of almond milk. enjoy!