"Honey Bear" cookies from Nordic Ware recipe

Stamped "Honey Bear" cookies

This Summer one of my friends became a grandmother. It's the first one of my friends to have a grandchild so in a curious and indirect way it felt like a sort of "milestone" for me. Especially as she's close to my age!  Her grandchild is in another state and my friend was keeping us all posted with pictures and updates about the birth and her trip to see the baby.  When she returned, we had a get together for her to celebrate. The party was an outdoor potluck.

For this occasion I felt a cake would have been too elaborate and it was warm enough that we would have had to deal with buttercream in the heat. So, I decided to make some cute cookies. Looking over my cookie supplies, I saw my Nordic Ware beehive stamp and I thought of combining it with my teddy bear chocolate mold to make some cute Honey Bear Cookies. I knew they would be easy, look different, and please our group. 

Here's the cookie stamp, and I only have the beehive stamp which I bought singly, not in the set, at a kitchen supply store in the next town over from us:

Honey Bees Cookie Stamps | Bakeware Accessories | Nordic Ware

And here's the teddy bear chocolate mold which I bought from Amazon a few years ago:

Amazon.com: CK Products 1-1/2-Inch Puffy Bear Chocolate Mold : Home & Kitchen


To make the cookies, I decided to branch out from my usual Martha Stewart sugar cookie recipe. Instead I used this one from Nordic Ware's website. It's different from my usual recipe because it uses brown sugar instead of white.  

 Ingredients

1 cup butter

212 grams sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla (I added 2)

320 g flour

1/2 tsp baking powder (I cut back from 1)

1/2 tsp salt

Directions:

1. Cream butter and sugar at medium speed until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla

2. Whisk Flour, baking powder and salt.

3. Add flour to batter slowly.

4. Blend thoroughly. Turn onto counter and knead until smooth. Refrigerate 2-3 hours

5. Roll out, cut or stamp, bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.

Supposedly this recipe is designed with the cookie stamps in mind. However, the cookie stamp didn't make a very deep impression on most of the cookies.  It was warm in the kitchen on this day, but still I wasn't very impressed with this aspect of the recipe.

I usually like softer cookies and don't like them to have any brown around the edges. With this in mind, I baked them for 11 minutes.  However, this ended up not being long enough, they were a bit underbaked.  They're big cookies, plus I placed each tray in the freezer for 10 minutes before baking to help them keep their shape and the impression.  If making again I would definitely bake them for 12-13 minutes. 

It wasn't a total loss and they still retained the feeling of a beehive, even if not as sharply defined. And most importantly, they tasted good.

For the honey bear, I bought several chocolate bars to melt down. I ended up chopping up and blending semi-sweet chocolate and milk chocolate.  They taste was pretty good. I used up three 4-oz chocolate bars and had to fill up the last few bears with a few chocolate chips I had in the pantry. It's amazing how much chocolate each bear in that mold takes!  After filling the molds, it's just a matter of placing them on a tray in the freezer for 10 minutes or until solid, and then they pop out very easily.  I then "glued" a chocolate bear to each cookie using a dab of melted chocolate. 

It was so much fun to take out all my cookie supplies and design and make these Honey Bear cookies!  We had a beautiful Summer's evening celebrating, lots of people from our friend group dropped by, the food everyone brought was delicious, and my cookies were a hit. The new grandma even took a picture to send to her kids!

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