Recipe: Easy Cream Cheese Cookies

During Safeway's Monopoly game, I got a coupon for a brick of cream cheese. But I didn't want to eat more bagels, so I wasn't sure what to do with it. Cakescottage had my answer. These cream cheese cookies really are easy to make!

Ingredients

• ½ Cup Unsalted Butter (*room temperature)
• 3 oz. Regular Cream Cheese (*room temperature)
• 1½ Cups Confectioner’s Sugar
• ½ tsp Baking Powder
• 1 Egg (*room temperature)
• ½ tsp Pure Vanilla Extract
• 1¾ Cups All – Purpose Flour

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 375°F and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. Cream butter and cream cheese in mixer bowl. Slowly add sugar and beat until fluffy. Beat in egg, add flour, baking powder and vanilla. Mix Well.
3. Chill dough for at least 1 hour. Shape into 1 inch balls, and dredge in superfine sugar or caster sugar.
4. Place on lined cookie sheet, spacing them about 1½ inches apart. One thing I don’t want you to skip, however, is slightly flattening the dough balls before baking.
5. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until the edges become slightly golden brown. They should look slightly under-baked (otherwise they won't be chewy).
6. Cool for 1 minute on cookie sheet then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.
7. If desired, sprinkle with powdered sugar once cooled, but do not overdo it because they are sweet enough.
8. You’ll get no less than 2 dozen cookies out of this dough. Cookies can be stored in an airtight container for 3-5 days.

As usual, I did a few things my own way. First of all, a brick of cream cheese is eight ounces, and this recipe only calls for three. So I doubled the whole recipe so I could at least use the majority of the cream cheese. I didn't bother "dredging" the dough through sugar or sprinkling them with powdered sugar afterwards, just because of the mess that could cause. I'll admit that the cookies probably are better with the powdered sugar on the outside, but they aren't bad without; you can just taste the cream cheese savory flavor a little bit. And seeing as the dough needs to cool for at least an hour, I didn't bother preheating the oven until after that; clearly that would be a waste of energy otherwise!

These are similar to "butter ball" cookies. I'd recommend them!