Baby Shower Baked Goods

Last week in the office, someone mentioned to me that it has been a while since I've made carrot cake sandwich cookies. I was glad to be reminded of this, because I had been pondering what to make for the baby shower we hosted yesterday, and these seem to fit the bill perfectly.

Inside-Out-Carrot Cake Cookies
are essentially a carrot-cake flavored whoopie pie, with cream cheese filling. I don't care for the filling included with the original recipe (a mixture of honey and cream cheese); instead I use the frosting recipe from Pumpkin-Raisin Bars (a mixture of cream cheese, butter, and powdered sugar). The Pumpkin-Raisin Bar frosting is just oustanding, and one frosting recipe produces exactly enough filling for one batch of the carrot cookies. I usually leave out the raisins in the cake recipe but include the nuts; however, I think you can pretty much improvise the mix-ins any way you like. Tom commented that the kitchen smelled like Thanksgiving while I was baking these!


I also made a batch of Lemon Cream Scones to go with the Lemon Curd I made over the weekend, and to make further use of my 5 lb. bag of lemons from Costco. While this is not my favorite scone recipe, it's not bad. I love the textural interest of the dried apricots. And pretty much any fruit scone served with lemon curd is extra delicious.


Finding the correct temperature setting on my oven continues to be an annoying game. The oven at least now seems to preheat quickly enough, but continues to run anywhere from 25 to 75 degrees cold. At least it will hold a temperature steady once it decides on one. I did some Google searches on Viking ovens and it turns out that the igniters fail regularly, resulting in the slow preheat and inability to come to temperature problems that I've been seeing. At the moment, I'm willing to live with it, but we'll see how the oven performs as I go into holiday baking season.

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