Welcome to my unofficial Valentine’s Day baking series! I feel like I’ve been neglecting the blog lately with my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies and 10 Days of Lunar New Year series being almost exclusively shared on Instagram. We are changing that with the next few recipes which were developed with Valentine’s Day in mind, but there are good for any time of the year. We’re starting off this unofficial series with these sparkly, crispy-yet-chewy (cookie buzzword!) stuffed red velvet cookies. What are they stuffed with? You can tell your Valentine that the cookies are stuffed with love, but here on this corner of the internet love also means cream cheese. So basically, we made red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting in cookie form and damn it is good.
Before you get start going on and on about why red velvet is not the superior cake flavour, I’m here to tell you that any shortcomings of red velvet is made up for by cream cheese frosting. It is also the reason I eat carrot cake (even if the cake has raisins in it). Much like red velvet cake, these cookies are vanilla based with a hint of chocolate, just enough for you to notice that it’s there. We stuff each dough ball with a cream cheese frosting centre and roll it in red coarse sanding sugar to amp up the colour and to give them the sparkle that they deserve. These cookies are great warm, but I like them even better when they have had some time to cool down or even chilled in the fridge. Once chilled, the cream cheese centre becomes cheesecake-like, so you get two desserts in one.
Stuffed Red Velvet Cookies
Ingredients
Cream Cheese Filling
- 227 g (8 oz) cream cheese , room temperature
- 60 g (1/2 cup) icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp salt
Red Velvet Cookie Dough
- 240 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
- 21 g (1/4 cup) cocoa powder
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 250 g (1 1/4 cup) granulated sugar
- 227 g (1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1 large egg, room temperature
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 – 1 tsp red food colouring, depending on brand of food colouring
- 3/4 cup red coarse sanding sugar, for rolling
Instructions
Cream Cheese Filling
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine cream cheese, icing sugar, vanilla, and salt on low speed. Gradually increasing the speed to medium, mix until filling is smooth, about 1 minute.
- Portion cream cheese mixture into 12 equal portions and place on a baking sheet. Each portion will be roughly a heaping tablespoon. Transfer baking sheet to freezer to chill while you make the cookie dough.
Red Velvet Cookie Dough
- Preheat oven to 350F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, coca powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat together sugar and butter on medium speed until smooth, about 1 minute.
- Add egg, vanilla, and red food colouring. Mix until combined.
- Add the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until no dry streaks remain, about 1 minute.
- Using an ice cream scoop, divide the dough into 12 equal portions. Roll each portion between the palms of your hands until it is round. Repeat.
- Remove cream cheese filling from freezer.
- Using your knuckle or a teaspoon, create an indent at the centre of each cookie dough ball. Place a portion of chilled cream cheese filling and pinch the dough to seal the filling.
- Roll each dough ball in red coarse sanding sugar.
- Place dough ball on baking sheet, leaving at least 2 inches between each dough ball.
- Bake until the edges of the cookies are set, about 11 – 13 minutes. When the cookies are ready to come out of the oven, give the baking sheet a tap on the oven rack to create ripples around the cookie.
- Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 10 minutes. Transfer them to a cooling rack to cool complete.
- Enjoy cookies at room temperature or chilled.
![day two: sparkly matcha neapolitan shortbread cookies ✨
the instructions might seem confusing, but if you watch the video to see how the different flavour layers are stacked, it will make much more sense! these slice and bake cookies freeze extremely well so you can make the dough now and bake them off when you want to gift them. (makes 40-44)
vanilla dough:
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g (6 tbsp) powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
matcha dough:
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g (6 tbsp) powdered sugar
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
2 tsp culinary matcha powder
1/4 tsp salt
strawberry dough
85g (1/3 cup + 2 tsp) unsalted butter, room temp
45g 6 tbsp) powdered sugar
90g (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour
2 tbsp freeze-dried strawberry powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg white
coarse sanding sugar
for the vanilla dough, combine butter and powdered sugar in a bowl. mix until smooth. add vanilla. add flour and salt and mix until no dry streaks remain. do the same for the matcha and strawberry doughs in separate bowls
place one portion of the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll into a 5 x 9-inch rectangle that is about 1/4-inch thick. slide rolled out dough onto a baking sheet and freeze for 10 min until firm. repeat this step with the other portions of dough
remove the top piece of parchment from each slab and stack the strawberry, vanilla, and matcha dough layers. cut the slab down the middle the long way to form two 2.5 x 9-inch rectangles. with one half, carefully swap the order of the layers (example: if the first half of the dough is stacked svm, swap the second half so it’s msv. this will ensure that same flavour squares don’t stack on each other). stack the halves. press the layers gently to adhere them. return the stacked dough to the freezer for another 10min
[recipe cont’d in comments]
#christmasbaking #christmascookies #holidaybaking #holidaycookies #cookiedecorating](https://constellationinspiration.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
Sandy says
These turned out so yummy, thank you for the recipe! However, the dough really sticks to my hand when I try to flatten them to stuff the frosting, so the frosting and dough kinda go all over my hand. Do you have any tips for this, please? 🙂
Lauren says
I found chilling the dough to be very helpful in making them not stick so much. It’s warm in my kitchen so I made 6, chilled the dough while I baked those, and then repeated. They were sooooo good!!
Mindy says
Made a double recipe for an annual cookie exchange with my friends and they were great! They weren’t the prettiest (they spread a lot) but they tasted wonderful – my husband especially loved them. I didn’t have any sanding sugar but used dry demerara sugar that had a coarse grain and it worked well.
Next time, I’ll:
– freeze the cream cheese mixture for a little longer and use a spoon to help me scoop it up into the dough (my hands kept melting the cream cheese and it started getting messy pretty quickly)
– chill the dough before stuffing/baking (I think my home was too warm which caused them to stick to my hands and also spread a ton in the oven)
Eros says
Can these cookies be prepped in advance and then thawed to add in the cream cheese filling another day ?