Baking Double Feature - Maple Cookies and Poppy Seed Rolls!

Maple cookies - perfect for fall!

Whenever I bring my baked goods into work, I always have an irrational fear that no one will eat any of it and that there will be tons leftover for me to deal with. Every single time, my fears are proved ridiculous, with the cookies and cupcakes disappearing usually before lunch. This week was no different: I brought a dozen and a half of chewy maple brown sugar cookies into the office and within three hours of me setting them down, they were all gone.

Why maple flavored? Well, I came across a delicious looking recipe for maple dijon chicken on one of my favorite cooking blogs. I'm not a fan of mustard and maple syrup is kind of expensive, but the comments looked promising, so I went for it. The verdict? The chicken was absolutely amazing and it's definitely going on my remake list.

Of course, it meant I had a lot of maple syrup leftover, which naturally meant that I was going to make something maple-flavored for my next baking project. I found a good basic recipe on Allrecipes and modified it for my own use. I also added a maple icing to drizzle over the cookies to add a little more taste.

These turned out quite interesting - straight out of the oven, the cookies didn't taste like much, but after cooling overnight, they tasted amazing - subtle maple flavor complemented the brown sugar very well and it wasn't too sugary.

While I was making these, a friend was also over baking poppy seed rolls as well, or mohnschnecke, as they are known as in Germany. Traditional mohnschnecke is made with a yeast pastry dough and ground poppy seeds in the filling, but there wasn't enough time to make a dough from scratch and we didn't have a spice grinder to ground the whole poppy seeds, so we just made do with what we had. Using puff pastry dough and a filling with whole poppy seeds, the recipe turned out relatively well!

Poppy seed snails! :)

Maple Brown Sugar Cookies - makes ~18 cookies

Cookies: 

• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, melted
•  1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups of all-purpose flour

Icing: 

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• ~5 Tbsp maple syrup
• ~3 Tbsp coconut creamer

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix the melted butter and brown sugar together. 
3. Add the egg, maple syrup, and vanilla extract. 
4. Mix in the flour, salt, and baking soda until well-blended. 
5. Drop 1 inch balls onto parchment paper on baking sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes until the tops start to crack slightly. 
6. While the cookies cool, whip up the sugar, syrup, and creamer until the icing is spreadable. Once the cookies are cool enough, drizzle the icing over the cookies. Enjoy!

Mohnschnecke (poppy seed snails) - makes ~20 rolls

Poppy Seed Filling: 

• 1 cup poppy seeds
•  1/4 cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup almond milk 
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Rolls

• 1 package of puff pastry

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Melt butter in pan over medium heat, and then stir in sugar, milk, cinnamon, and salt. 
3. To add the eggs, carefully add about a cup of the hot liquid to the beaten eggs, slow enough that the eggs don't cook. Once the eggs are mixed with that amount of liquid, the egg/liquid mixture can be poured back into the pans. 
4. Continue whisking the mixture until it starts to thicken and coat a spoon. 
5. Roll the puff pastry out and spread the filling over the dough. 
6. Roll into a tube and carefully slice it into 1 inch pieces.
7. Arrange on a baking sheet and bake for ~ 20 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. 
8. Enjoy!