Planes, Trains, and Running Shoes

Hello! Welcome back to The Great Social Distance Bakeoff! I have loved seeing how many people have joined in the fun and shared their flourless cakes last week! I seem to have been the only one to take on a tea infused cake but that's ok! Your flourless cakes have me thinking that cake week should continue.

Kidding. Guys, I have so much cake in my house right now. So it's a good thing we're moving on to Cookie Week!


If you're new here or didn't get the chance to bake last week, jump in anyway! There's no actual competition here! As a reminder, there are a few rules:

• If you use a recipe, please credit the source! Recipes from cookbooks should not be posted in their entirety without the author's permission! 
• You don't have to do both bakes each week, but if you're only going to do one, it has to be the technical challenge!
• Substitutions are highly encouraged! I'm keeping this very broad because I know how hard groceries are to come by right now. The point is NOT to go out searching for specific ingredients but to use what you have and to get creative with it! Do you have rose water lying around that you've never opened? What can you do with it?

Your signature challenge this week is to make cut-out cookies! Dig out your rolling pin (or a bottle of wine, if you don't have one) and your cookie cutters and let's see what you come up with!

I attempted homemade speculoos (aka Biscoff, aka Cookie Butter cookies) cookies. After spending hours searching the internet for a recipe and reading dozens of reviews that said they didn't tase like the real thing, I finally settled on a recipe from King Arthur flour...which didn't tase like the real thing BUT they are delicious and taste like Christmas and my house smells amazing. So, I guess it worked? Pro-tip? Definitely, definitely let you cookies sit in the refrigerator overnight so they don't spread!

For your technical challenge, you are to make sandwich cookies! You can use anything you want for the middle - ice cream, frosting, ganache - as long as it's sandwiched between two (as close to identical as possible) cookies.

I can't wait to see what you come up with! And if anyone has a recipe for speculoos cookies that taste just like the store bought kind, please send it my way!