Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies

Last year, after Addison came home from her first day of school, she asked me if we could make cookies. It had been a pretty hectic day for all of us, so, I thought she had a pretty good idea. I called them "We all survived the first day of school" cookies. 

So, when the first day of school came this year, I made sure to have all the ingredients on hand to make cookies again. I think this is a great tradition to start and hope to carry it on with Addison and (sooner than I'd like) Camden. I'm sure the day will come that one or both of them will be too "cool" to make "We all survived the first day of school" cookies with mom. When that day comes, I may drown my sorrows by eating all of the cookies. But until it does, I will just eat a couple of them and enjoy the memories that I'm making with my kids.

Here's the recipe:

CHOCOLATE CHIP PUDDING COOKIES

Source: Six Sisters' Stuff

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 (3.4 ounce) package instant vanilla pudding
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350° F.  Combine flour and baking soda and set aside.  In a large bowl, cream together butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar and pudding mix.  Beat in eggs and vanilla.  Add flour mixture until combined.  Fold in chocolate chips.  Roll into 1″ balls and place on a greased baking sheet.  Bake for 8-12 minutes, or until golden brown.

I hope you all enjoy these as much as we do!

So long for today...

Meringue Ghost Cookies

Happy Thursday everyone! We made it through hump day and are on the down hill slide to the weekend! I'm really looking forward to the weekend more than normal! We have some pretty exciting things going on, especially for Addison and Camden. I will fill you all in with lots of pictures after the weekend. I might do a weekend recap just to get it all in. The kids are definitely going to have a good time!

I've decided that I'd like to share some recipe posts with you all for the Fall. My goal is to share one recipe a week with you that we've tried. This week, I'm sharing these adorable Meringue Ghost Cookies. Addison and I made them Sunday afternoon and had so much fun. The hardest part is waiting for them to bake and then allowing them enough time to cool. Addison has my (lack of patience) but she did great waiting for these. I love meringue, especially when it's home made! And how cute are these as ghosts?

Here's the recipe:

MERINGUE GHOST COOKIES
Points+: 1
Source: Food Fanatic
Servings: 20

4 egg whites
1/2 t. cream of tartar
3/4 c. sugar
1/2 t. clear vanilla extract
candy eyes

Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

In a mixing bowl, combine the egg whites, vanilla and cream of tartar and beat on medium speed until the mixture begins to froth. Gradually add in the sugar (I added mine in 1/4 cup at a time). Increase speed to medium-high and beat the mixture until stiff peaks form, about 5-6 minutes.

You can use either a piping bag with a round tip, or I used a gallon size Ziplock freezer back with the corner snipped off. Spoon the meringue mixture into the bag and pipe little mounds onto the parchment paper. Add the candy eyes to the ghosts before you put in the oven.

Bake for approximately 1.5 hours at 200 degrees or until the meringues are dry and crisp when you touch them. Turn the oven off and leave them in the oven for about 3 hours. This allows them to completely dry. ENJOY!!

These can be stored in an air-tight container for up to 3 days.

These were so much fun to make and they really are easy. I took a few to work to share and everyone got a kick out of them and said how good they are.

I hope you all have a great day and weekend if I don't get another post up before Sunday.

So long for today...

White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake Cookies

Hey friends! We made it through another Monday! So far, I'm sticking to my weekly plan! I got my yoga done last night, too. I had to do it in two different parts because of a hungry baby, but I got it done! It's been too long since I've done it. I'm so glad I got it in. Tonight is supposed to be a 3 mile family walk. Hopefully, TC isn't late getting home (of course, since I wrote this he will be!) and the humidity is low like it was last night.

I'm a huge fan of Subway. I think anyone that is trying to eat better and maybe lose some weight is. It's a great place to go to get a lighter meal that still tastes good and doesn't deprive you. I think the hardest part about going to Subway is resisting their cookies. I mean, you do so well making all of the right choices, then when you get up to the register to pay, there, right in front of you is a case of delicious looking cookies. Now, normally, it's not very hard for me to resist these cookies. It was a completely different story though when I saw that they had a new flavor a couple of years back. White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake. Are you kidding me? I love all those flavors. So I decided to try one...WOW! They were delicious. Definitely not good for my waistline! The only good thing was that not all the stores carried them. So I was safe as long as I chose my Subway wisely. When we were getting ready to go on one of our cruises, I contacted Subway to see if I could buy some of this dough so that I could bake the cookies at home to take with us, but they said no. My mission was to find a recipe for these delicious cookies. Well, more than two years later, I FINALLY found a recipe. These taste just like the Subway cookies. I'm telling you, you definitely want to make these cookies...then freeze them so you don't eat them all at once!

Here's the recipe:

WHITE CHOCOLATE RASPBERRY CHEESECAKE COOKIES
adapted from Six Sisters' Stuff
Servings: 24 large cookies or 36 small cookies
Points+: 4 or 6 Pts+ depending on size

4 ounces light cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
2 Tablespoons shortening
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 (7 ounce) boxes Jiffy raspberry muffin mix
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

In a large mixing bowl, beat together cream cheese, butter, shortening and brown sugar until just combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each. Fold in muffin mix and flour until combined. Stir in white chocolate chips and chill dough in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease baking sheets with nonstick cooking spray. Roll dough into 1" balls (I used a small cookie scoop) and place on baking sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes, or just until the edges are golden brown.

I hope you're all having a great week and are sticking to your Weekly Food & Fitness Plans! I'm hoping to have another WIAW post for you tomorrow if I can remember to take pictures of all of my food!

So long for today...

Chocolate Cool Whip Cookies

Do they have a cure for spring fever? I might need to Google it to find out. Today was another abnormally warm day in South Carolina. The sun was shining bright all day. It's a really good thing that today was my Friday off, because I'm not sure I would have been able to get much work done today, especially because I know the weather is supposed to go downhill tomorrow...FAST! So I'm glad I was able to enjoy it while I could.

After my migraine last night, I was glad that it had dulled down this morning. I thought that maybe an easy run and some fresh air might help, too. So after I was sure I was awake this morning, I headed out for a run. Well, it didn't take me long to realize that this was not the best idea. My head started pounding again. Luckily, my papparazzi of TC and Addison were beside me on the golf cart and I was able to hitch a ride back to the house. I came home, ate some breakfast, popped a Relpax, took a shower and headed down to see Jimmy for a touch up and trim. I'm happy to report that the only remnant of my migraine is some tension at the base of my neck. Biggest Loser Yoga helped a little bit with that and I think a good night's sleep will help even more.

On our way home today, we did stop at our local fresh meat market to replenish our supply of hamburgers. Usually, I like to get a couple of fresh steaks to grill for dinner when I go here, too. So I got a couple for us and my parents and we had them down for dinner tonight. I even tried a variation of my Cool Whip Cookie recipe using chocolate cake mix. They were DEEE-licious! Here's the recipe:

CHOCOLATE COOL WHIP COOKIES
Servings: 40 - 50
Points+: 1 (per cookie)

1 box milk chocolate cake mix
1 16-oz. container FF Cool Whip
2 eggs
1/2 c. powdered sugar

Combine cake mix, Cool Whip and eggs in bowl and mix until well combined. Batter will be very sticky. Place in refrigerator and chill for at least one hour. You can leave in refrigerator overnight if you want to make the batter ahead of time.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls into powdered sugar and roll to coat. Place on greased cookie sheet. Bake for 14 minutes. After removing from oven, allow to cool for a couple of minutes before removing from cookie sheet.

These were so good! They tasted just like a brownie. But they were so much better because I know they were only one point per cookie. How great is that?

Ok, off to bed to sleep of the tension in my neck. Tomorrow, we're taking Addison to the circus, then I think it's dinner at my sister's house.

So long for today...

Cool Whip Cookies

Ah! Another flex Friday. I love having every other Friday off of work. What makes them even better is that TC has every Friday off of work so we get a bonus family day together. Sometimes we have definite plans and other times, we just relax and see what happens. Today was a day that I had a definite plan, but the rest of the family didn't. First, I wanted to get a run in, which I did. I also needed to run some errands to get the documents that I needed to renew my passport with my married name. Even though we got married 5 years ago, I hadn't changed my name on my passport. I figured that, until I had to, I wasn't going to. Well, since my passport expires in March and we're going on our cruise in April, that time has come. Since you never know how long it will take this Federal Agency to work, I wanted to get this taken care of well in advance. Apparently, that is today. So I needed to take care of getting my passport photos taken and getting a certified copy of our marriage license, both of which I did. It's a good feeling to know that I got everything accomplished today that I wanted to.

Some good friends from Pennsylvania came in last night and are staying at my parents house. Since Addison was talking about seeing "Bucky" all day, we decided to head up there for the evening. Not wanting to go empty handed, I made a batch of Alabama Firecrackers and Cool Whip cookies. I've been playing around with the different cake mixes that I've used when making these cookies. I've already tried lemon and strawberry. So far, lemon have been my favorite. When I looked in the pantry, I saw a French Vanilla cake mix, so I decided to try that one today, assuming they would taste similar to a sugar cookie. While I did like these ones, they're still not as good as the Lemon Cool Whip Cookies. Here's the recipe:

COOL WHIP COOKIES
adapted from Slender Kitchen
Servings: about 48
Points+: 1 per cookie

1 cake mix, any flavor
2 eggs
1 medium container fat free Cool Whip
1/2 c. powdered sugar

Combine cake mix, eggs and cool whip and mix until well combined. Mixture will be pretty thick and sticky. Chill in refrigerator for 1 hour, until mixture has thickened a bit more. Drop tablespoons of mixture into powedered sugar and roll until coated. Place on cookie sheet sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 14 - 16 minutes, or until edges are slightly browned. Allow to cool for 2 minutes before removing from cookie sheet.

You can also make these the day ahead of time and chill the batter in the fridge overnight. I've made these quite a few times since I found this recipe. Most everytime I make them I get compliments on them. People are really surprised when I tell them that they're WW-friendly. I would definitely recommend taking these to your next get together. All your friends will thank you!

So long for today...