Lemon Surprise Cookies

 

I tried a new cookie recipe yesterday and am very glad to share this success with others.  It's a chewy, sweet but tart, light cookie that's perfect for summer (or the tail end of summer, as everyone is feeling heading up to labor day).  It reminds me a bit of my chocolate peanut butter surprise cookies as far as technique goes, so I made a batch of those as well for my lucky coworkers.
The recipe comes courtesy of SewLicious Home Decor.  I've only made a few edits to make the instructions a bit easier for me to follow.  Enjoy!

Lemon Surprise Cookies
Yields approx. 2 dozen cookies
Prep time: 1-2 hours (filling needs to freeze before baking)
Bake time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

Cookie

• 1 box supreme white cake mix (just using the powder mix; you do not prepare it as directed on the box)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil (not butter)
• 3.4-oz box lemon Jello instant pudding mix

Cheesecake Filling

• 4 oz cream cheese, softened
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
• 2 cups powdered sugar

Instructions

1. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. Prepare cheesecake filling, mixing together all ingredients until creamy.  Spoon teaspoon-size dollops onto prepared baking sheet.  Place in freezer 1 hour or more until set.
3. In a mixing bowl, combine the cookie ingredients (cake mix, eggs, oil, and pudding mix).  Turn dough out onto saran wrap and refrigerate until cheesecake filling is set.
4. When filling is firm, preheat oven to 350° and assemble cookies.  Scoop 1-2 tablespoons of cookie dough and flatten into a circle in your palm.  Place a frozen dollop of cheesecake filling into center, and roll cookie dough around the filling, being careful to close up all seams.  Roll into a ball.
5. Place balls of dough with filling centers on baking sheet about 2 inches apart.
6. Bake 8-12 minutes or until set.  The tops won't brown, but the bottoms will.
7. Remove from oven and gently press down each cookie with a spatula or the bottom of a cup to flatten slightly.  Let sit on baking sheet 2 minutes, then transfer to wire rack.
8. Serve warm, or cool completely before storing.

Aaa!  They just look so summery and yummy!  I wish I could give you smell-o-vision, too.

Mmm- delicious filling.

Carpenter's Star Christmas Quilt Part 1

If there's one thing I've learned from my overdue blogging, it's that I forget the details from my crafts and recipes.  Trying to avoid that, I'm going to start detailing some of the exciting specifics as I begin piecing together my newest quilt!  It's a gorgeous carpenter's star I first saw on this quilt on Pinterest.  I figured out my own pattern from that (sadly, the link only showed the final quilting- not the pattern), and I made a quilt for my mother-in-law last Christmas.  A couple more baby quilts later, I wanted to revive the carpenter's star pattern for a red and white Christmas quilt for my family.  I am well aware that it is still summer, but I like having plenty of time to poke around and work on a quilt.  I made the one for my mother-in-law in a breakneck 6 weeks last winter and I have no need to repeat that frenzy.

So, those details I mentioned:

Pattern:

Fabric (for twin size quilt)

[Note: will result in plenty of extra fabric (~1/3 yard per color), which I count as a good thing for inevitable bad cuts, poor calculation (cough cough), stains, loved ones running off with bits of fabric, or other quilting- or life-related issues.)

• 4 yards white fabric
• 4 yards red fabric
• 1/2 yard binding fabric
• 4 1/2 yards backing fabric
• Twin quilt batting- high loft
• Red thread
• White thread

For the quilt top, I ended up getting 4 different patterns of red fabric (1 yard each), 3 patterns of white fabric (1 yard each), and 1 pattern with holly leaves- a mix of red, white, and green, as an accent stand in for some white parts of the star (1 yard).  I got a different red for the binding, and am using one of my red quilt top patterns for the backing (so for that pattern, I got 5 1/2 yards of fabric total).  With a 20% off coupon, the supplies all cost ~$80 I think.

Squares and Half-Square Triangles (HSTs)

• For each color, cut 12 squares and 24 HSTs
• Squares measure 5 1/2" square
• HSTs cut from 5 7/8" squares; end triangle measurement is 5 7/8 x 5 7/8 x 8 1/4; HSTs sewn together will measure 5 1/2" square, the same as your regular squares

I definitely needed to capture these measurements because I did NOT remember my sizes from the last star quilt.  I tried looking up some handy dandy charts online, and unfortunately the one I followed was off, perhaps because I wasn't cutting my HSTs the same way they were.  There are a lot of great tricks to save you time, but they require you to have multiple triangle pairs of the same two fabrics, which is not the case in my quilt.  What I did was cut each larger square, and cut it in half to get 2 triangles.  That likely threw off my end measurements to be bigger than the blossom heart quilts table.  Live and learn, right?  I had a lot of excess fabric so I cut new squares (now 5 1/2" square) to match my larger assembled HST squares.

After hours of cutting and laying out the pieces in the pattern, here's where I wound up:

As you can see, my designated spot in the living room was too small, so I had to lay out portions on the couch.  That's ok.  :)  You can see the few spots where I swapped out an all-white portion for the holly pattern.  I originally had the holly scattered throughout the white parts and it was too distracting, so I consolidated into designated groups and was much happier.

I currently have 4 or 5 rows sewn together, so I'm about 1/4 of the way through the quilt top rows.  Onward and upward!