Apple Pie Cookies – Christmas Cookies #6

An ice storm came in over night and by Saturday morning there was ice everywhere. The entire yard, trees and cars were covered in at least 2 inches of ice.

Because of the ice you could hear the sound of falling tree limbs around the neighborhood. The lights would flicker now and again and we knew it was only a mater of time before a tree limb would fall and the power would go out.

Wouldn’t you know it we were right. By mid day the power was out and wouldn’t come back on for a few hours. Despite the power outage we stayed pretty warm and lit some candles so we could see. 

Since there was no power, I couldn’t bake any cookies on Saturday. It was now four days to Christmas and I was beginning to feel like my 12 day of Christmas cookies was too big a challenge. Not just in the baking but in the storing. After all I now had 4 dozen cookies of each of the 5 cookies I  had made this totals somewhere about 240 cookies, give or take. I was starting to run out of room in the refrigerator where I was storing the cookies in an air tight container.

Despite the power outage and limited space in the fridge I thought, what the hey, let’s make just one more batch of cookies. This would mean I would have six cookies, at least I would have made it through half of my challenge. 

So on the 9th day of Christmas I baked Apple Pie cookies. These cookies, like the pumpkin cookies, were made using a cake mix.

From the beginning I had planned to make some kind of cookie that used my apple pie filling. My hubby had wanted an apple pie, but I was on a cookie challenge, so I thought this would be the best of both.

First I started by making my apple pie filling, using about four apples, a tablespoon of butter, 1/4 cup of Splenda and 1/2 teaspoon of Cinnamon (see recipe here).

I was slightly afraid that the apple pie filling alone would not be enough to create the cookie dough consistency I needed for the cookies. So I kind of used the instructions for the Hershey Holiday cookies , then I mixed in the apple filling. 

Despite how the pictures look, there really wasn’t a lot of apple filling. The apples were small and I made the mistake of mixing the warm filling with the mixer whisk, which cause a lot of the apple to squish to a pulp. Still some did survive. 

Even though I added the pumpkin pie spice to create more of a spice cake flavor, the cookies tasted more like a sugar cookie. Although you could taste the apples a bit, I felt I should have used more apples, so that there was an apple in ever bite. 

Since the cookies didn’t have that spice apple flavor I was going for I thought I’d go ahead and enhance the flavor by topping the cookies with a brown sugar frosting. I found a wonderful brown sugar frosting recipe on the Cupcake Project blog. I halved the recipe since I didn’t need that much and I used Splenda brown sugar blend to cut down on some of the sugar.

After I topped the cookies with the frosting they looked fabulous, like store-bought. However there was still the taste test. Oddly enough the frosting didn’t give any more spice flavor to the cookie, instead it tasted like a doughnut. That’s right like a glazed doughnut. When you did bite into an apple bit it was almost like eating a baked apple fritter. Not what I was expecting but really good none the less.