A slight chill in the air, leaves changing color, pumpkin patch visits and trips to pick apples - these are all signs that Fall has arrived. These are all signs that I never see. Palm fronds do not change color and the only chill I feel in the morning is when one of my girls decides to turn on the hot water tap when I am in the shower. Such is life, and although I miss these things each Fall, living in a tropical paradise is pretty darn nice too.
It was exciting to find out that this month's theme for the Creative Cookie Exchange was apples, the versatile fruit that works equally well in both sweet and savory dishes. There are just so many great cookies that feature apple that it was hard to narrow it down to one. I finally decided on a recipe that included a little caramel, a little cider, and a little spice.
The recipe for caramel-stuffed cookies has been around for quite some time, but after a little research I settled on one and then started making some changes. The recipe called for regular Alpine Apple Cider Instant drink mix, but I decided to use the Caramel Apple version. Since the drink mix is very sweet I cut the sugar down to ½ a cup. A little extra spice never hurts in a cookie so I added a little apple pie spice -which is a wonderful blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, cloves and cardamom. I thought that apples pieces in the cookie would be nice too. Granny Smith are my usual apple of choice when baking because they hold up well and are a little tart, and I decided to grate them so the pieces were not too big. With these changes I found that I also had to add a little more flour so that the cookie mix was not too wet to work with when placing the caramels in the middle.
