Christmas Baking Part 2: Cranberry Bliss Bars

I love dried cranberries and I love white chocolate.  Combined they are even better!!  I also love the Starbucks Cranberry Bliss Bars.. however, I haven't had them in years.  I can't justify the cost of the little bar you get! 

Anyway... I had been contemplating what cookies to take home with us to Michigan while doing my nightly cooking/baking blog surfing, when I came across the Cranberry Bliss Bar copy cat recipe.  This started my search to find the exact recipe I wanted to use.. After searching and searching and finding only small differences between the various recipes I decided on this one from Good Eats 'n Sweet Treats.

Here are my notes:

• I only used the vanilla extract in the cake.. Other websites said to use both vanilla and orange extract.  This recipe says "or"..  I didn't have any orange extract...
• After trying to find candied ginger at 2 stores I gave up and decided not to add it.
• For the cake I used white chocolate chips instead of cutting up a bar
• Frosting-  I used the lemon juice.. at first I thought it tasted too Lemony... but as these bars sat in fridge the tasted mellowed out.
• Drizzle Icing-  I used the white chocolate chips melted because this is how I remember the actual bar from Starbucks..  This makes these bars pretty difficult to cut... so you  may want to cut them before the chocolate is completely hard.
• Also I used the trick of melting the white chocolate and shortening in the Ziplock that you are going to use to drizzle.. AMAZING!  Never thought of it before!!

• The recipe says 16 servings.. I got way way more!!  I cut these rather small.. they are really rich!

Christmas Baking Part 1: Molasses Softies

After a year of healthy cooking and dedicated gym attendance, a baking extravaganza was in order!  This Holiday season began with an over the top Thanksgiving meal and continued with every baking session that took place.. Thinking back I can't even count the pounds of butter that made it through this house!  Let alone the amount of sugar and flour.  It makes me slightly ill thinking about all the baking we did.. but we both enjoyed every second of it!  Expect to see a few posts over the next few days about our Holiday baking, because there was too much for just one post!

We had some leftover Molasses from Thanksgiving (I will post about that later...) so I really wanted to make some sort of Molasses or Gingerbread cookie.  I searched the internet for what felt like hours for the perfect recipe to constantly realize I was missing an ingredient (I had already been in a grocery store 3 times that day and was not going to head out again).  Finally I remembered I had received a collection of Christmas Cookie Exchange recipes at my wedding shower.  This book is amazing it was made by a group of friends (one of which was a student of my moms when she first started teaching) that have a cookie exchange every year.  These are tried and true recipes!  The book had exactly what I was looking for...... Molasses Softies.  These cookies were perfectly tender and soft and chewy!  Yumm...  

Now finally for the recipe!

Molasses Softies  (from Sweet Traditions)

1 cup Butter (room temperature)

1 1/3 cup Sugar

1 egg

1/3 cup Molasses

3 T Light Corn Syrup

2 T Milk

4 C.  All-purpose Flour  

2 tsp Baking Soda

2 tsp Ground Cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp Ground Ginger

1 1/2 tsp Ground Cloves

Sugar for Coating

Preheat oven to 350.  In large bowl, beat together butter, sugar, and egg until light and fluffy.  Beat in molasses, corn syrup, and milk until blended.  Add flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, beating until well blended.  It will be a very stiff dough.  Shape into 1-inch balls.  Roll balls in sugar to lightly coat.  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet, leaving some space between cookies for them to spread as they bake.   Bake 12-14 minutes or until golden.  Do NOT over-bake.  Cool 1-2 minutes on baking sheets and then remove to racks to cool.

NOTES:

• The cookies spread quite a bit, make sure to leave more space then you expect.
• Do NOT flatten the cookies (like you would peanut butter cookies)  they spread out enough. See picture below of my cookies in the oven to see how they started before they spread.