The Plaid Pladd

It seems like red velvet has been a big deal lately; more people I know are baking it in different iterations so I was pretty pleased about a month ago when I found this recipe for Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies. Finally I would jump on this bandwagon! I made them, and they turned out awesome. They were exactly the right consistency–cakey, but not gooey–and the frosting tasted great. I was in love, and vowed to make them again around Christmas time, maybe dyeing the frosting green to be festive.

So, because the YA Book Club Holiday party is today at my house (I always volunteer so that I can stay in pajamas till the last possible moment) I thought it was the perfect time to try!

Unfortunately, I was wrong. This recipe seemed so easy the first time I made it! I have no idea why this time was filled with mistakes. Probably I should have made them a day ahead so that I would not also be trying to vacuum/dust/sweep at the same time. But I haven’t given up on this recipe yet! It produced some passable cookies that I will still be putting out tonight. Okay, so some of them are a little bit crispy… okay, maybe a little bit blackened on the bottoms, and yeah I ran out of powdered sugar so the frosting isn’t as sweet and is a weirder consistency. But I bet no one will notice the difference.

So the linked website above has two versions of this recipe, and of course I use the “cheater” one. Not because I am uncomfortable with the homemade kind–you know I’ve got baking skillz–but because I can’t resist that thrill I get from cheating. Okay, and I’m lazy, whatever. With the cheater recipe, here are the THREE ingredients for the cookies:

A box of red velvet cake mix, two eggs, and half a cup of oil

The recipe calls for canola oil, but I use vegetable because that’s how I roll. You mix those up in a bowl until it makes a bright red sticky blob. Then you divide that out and put them on cookie sheets:

Parchment paper is for rockers

Preheat to 350 degrees and bake for 10-12 minutes.
So I know when making cookies you’re supposed to line them up as cutesy little balls of dough, but I like to give mine a little help with flattening out. Especially this recipe. And especially on that pan. I made two pans’ worth of these: one on this, the airbake pan, and one on a normal pan. I am sort of wary of the airbake pan because it acts strangely and often unexpectedly. I think we’ve reached an understanding with each other where I always leave it in for longer than specified and it makes my cookies soft, not crispy regardless. I’m okay with that, I like soft cookies.

Which is why it’s funny that it was the OTHER pan that burned. These aribake ones turned out beautifully.

Okay, so it's only the bottoms that are kind of burned.

This batch also turned out a lot puffier than the airbake one, I assume because I wasn’t as assiduous about flattening them down.

Here's the airbake batch, all flat and beautiful and perfect

Clearly the airbake pan is trying to fake me out to keep me on my toes. It was at this point that I realized the frosting/filling recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of milk and we were out! So I went to the store.

You don't have to use awesome local-dairy-glass-bottle milk, but it helps

Then I came home and realized that the powdered sugar I thought we had was running perilously low thanks to Steven’s many valiant attempts to make homemade hot chocolate late into the night. The recipe calls for 4 cups… I doubt we had half of that. But I don’t know because I didn’t measure. I just dumped it all in there. There was no way I was going to the store again. It is freakin cold outside. Besides, it had the correct amount of butter and cream cheese and milk and vanilla. How bad could it be?

The answer, not that bad. Just kind of weird. It’s definitely not the fluffy consistency from the last time I made these. And may or may not still have tiny clumps of unbroken up cream cheese. But those melt on your mouth like a beautiful surprise. I’m unrepentant.

Anyway, while putting these bad boys together I paired burnt-with-burnt so that at least some (okay, four–but that is eight cookies total!) sandwiches would turn out more or less great. If you ignore the frosting problems.

Okay, the one on the side is half-burned half-not burned. So that'll be a fun surprise.

But obv I’m having a party so I have to put out more than four cookies. I will maybe call the other plate the “crispier” version. Or maybe only four people will show up and then I will assume that my non-airbake pan is psychic and trying to save me from getting fatter than fat on the leftovers! Then later in the cupboard it will teach the airbake pan a lesson about manners and not being weird.

Okay, time to stop anthropomorphizing my cooking gear. I think I will go discuss with my Christmas cone how if people read my blog they would be forewarned about which cookies to eat etc before coming over.