Carrot Cake Kiss Cookies Recipe

Easter is nearly here and I thought I’d make something a little bit different this year. It all began when I was wandering the aisles of my local grocery store. I was actually looking for bunny shaped Peeps for a different recipe and couldn’t find any at all. What’s up with that??? But then I spied these bags of Carrot Cake Flavoured Hershey’s Kisses and changed direction. Personally, I love anything carrot cake flavoured any time of year, but these Carrot Cake Kiss Cookies are definitely a fun idea for switching things up from the traditional this Easter.

Carrot Cake Kiss Cookies Recipe

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2 T. milk

1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

Hershey’s Carrot Cake Flavoured Kisses (of course, if they ever stop making these, you can use any of your favourite kisses with this recipe!)

Optional: 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 to 3/4 cup finely shredded carrots – Normally when I make carrot cake cookies, I include these but the people I was serving the cookies too weren’t big fans of really pronounced carrot cake flavour so I left this out. That way the only carrot cake flavour came from the Hershey’s Kisses themselves.

Instructions:

Cream together the butter and sugar. Once creamy, add in the egg, milk, and vanilla. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Using your mixer, add the dry ingredients to the wet a little at a time, mixing well after each. Form one inch balls of dough (I love my cookie scoop for this) and place on baking sheets, about an inch apart. Gently flatten each cookie ball. I just used my fingers to do this but you could use the bottom of a glass. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

While they’re baking:

Remove the wrappers from the kisses. I wait until then to do it because it gives me something to do while waiting for the cookies to bake and by then I’m sure of exactly how many cookies I’m making. Otherwise, I’d probably unwrap too many and then I’d have to eat them! I don’t know about you but I never manage to get a consistent number of cookies out of one recipe but in this case, it made 20. As soon as the cookies come out of the oven, place a kiss on each one.

An Interesting Development:

Now here’s something that was a little different for me. I’ve made peanut butter cookies before and added chocolate kisses to them. Those kisses retained their shape. These seem to have a creamy filling in them and I couldn’t get them to hold their shape at all. I tried waiting for them to cool slightly before adding the kisses but that didn’t help. No, instead of looking like those little Hershey’s Kiss shape we all know and love, they melted into a sort of blob in the center of each cookie. If you’re fussy about having pretty, perfect cookies this may bother you. We just care about yummy cookies and so the blobs didn’t deter us.

If you’ve hung out with me here on Creative Cynchronicity for very long, you know I’m not much for baking. I love to cook but baking requires so much measuring and precision so I tend to shy away from it. When I do bake, I generally like really quick, easy, and low fuss recipes. This recipe for Carrot Cake Kiss Cookies definitely fits the bill. Just a few minutes of prep and about 10 minutes in the oven – in less than 20 minutes, you’ll find yourself trying not to burn your tongue as you sneak a bite of one of these yummy cookies. No, really, that melted chocolate kiss gets SUPER hot, so please try to restrain yourself and wait until they’re fully cooled.