Surprise! (It's A Cookie)

Way, way back in the dark ages, before there was Abby Cadabby, or Baby Bear - hey, even before there was Elmo (gasp!), there was a series of books called "The Sesame Street Library". Fifteen volumes of Sesame Street awesomeness, and I had them all. If you can still get hold of these, I highly recommend picking a set up for your child. Or, you know, your inner child.

One of the features of each volume (or most of them) was a recipe - sometimes it was something different, like Big Bird's Banana Bread, but usually it was a cookie recipe presented by Cookie Monster. The first volume contained a basic cookie dough recipe (see below), and the other volumes used this dough in various ways. I would pore over these recipes in Rapturous Contemplation of All The Possibilities.

The weird thing is, despite the huge amount of baking I did with my mother as a child, I do not remember ever having made any of those cookies!

Anyway, the other cool thing about those books is, I Still Have Them. Yep, the very same ones my mother bought for me in the late seventies. Actually, they belong to The Muffin now. And we decided we would make some of those cookies. After some perusal, we were most taken with the idea of the Surprise Cookies.

It's actually a very cool idea. You start with a basic cookie dough. Obviously Cookie Monster uses his very own recipe, and so did we. However I see no reason why you couldn't use your favourite sugar cookie dough, as long as it's fairly stable. Cookie Monster's dough is a bit tougher than my usual sugar cookie recipe, and I think this probably helps to keep these cookies in one piece once they are baked. Anyway, once you have your dough of choice, roll it out thinly and cut it into circles. Then add some kind of filling to one circle...

... and add another circle on top. Pinch around the edges (note my five-year-old hand model)....


... and bake! These are very easy, and a great fun cooking activity to do with kids. The trick is to do lots of different fillings, and give them no identifying marks...


So the fun part is, when you pick up a cookie, you don't know what it contains...

The peanut butter choc chip were my favourites...


This filling was lucky I didn't eat it before I put it in the cookies...

Mmm...

Another surprise favourite was the tinned apple filling. Everyone who tried these listed it in their top two. Which brings me to the only problem with these cookies...

When it's this much fun finding out what's inside, noone can stop at one!


Cookie Monster's Cookie Dough
(thanks to Sesame Street & The Childrens Television Workshop)

Ingredients (exactly as listed in the book)
3/4 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Modus Operandi (same as in the book, but abbreviated somewhat.)
Combine butter and sugar in a mixing bowl (the recipe says to use a fork. I used my mixer). Add eggs and vanilla and mix to combine. Add dry ingredients and mix to form a dough. Refrigerate for at least an hour before rolling out.