Frosted Brown Sugar Pop Tarts Turned into Gourmet Cookies

Introduction Hey, it's Sam from Sugar Spun Run, and today we are making brown sugar Pop Tart cookies. Alright, today's recipe is a fun and unique one. This is a new addition to my gourmet cookie recipe collection. So if you've enjoyed like my blueberry muffin cookies or my strawberry cheesecake stuffed cookies, you're probably going to like this one as well. There are a couple different parts, but overall it comes together pretty quickly, so let's get started. We're going to need a large mixing bowl. Combine butter and sugars in a large mixing bowl and use an electric mixer (or stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment) to beat until light, fluffy, and well-creamed). And, to this, we are going to add one cup of softened unsalted butter, one cup of granulated sugar and a half cup of firmly packed light brown sugar. So these are inspired, obviously, by the brown sugar Pop Tarts, which were my favorite Pop Tarts as a kid, but there's not a whole lot of brown sugar that goes into the cookie base. For the cookie base, I wanted it to be not too sweet, kind of reminiscent of that pastry crust, which isn't too sweet. We're going to have enough sugar in the filling. So let's go ahead and cream together the butter and sugars, as we do, until they are nice and light and fluffy. So we want the butter and sugar to be well creamed, so I'm usually mixing it on about medium speed for about a minute or so in order to get to this point. Now today's recipe could absolutely be made with a stand mixer instead, but today I am just using my electric hand mixer. Alright, once everything is nicely combined or nicely creamed, we're going to add our eggs. Add eggs and vanilla extract and stir again until thoroughly combined. Set aside. So today we're using two large eggs, and these should ideally be room temperature. I'm trying to pick—trying to pick my favorite one. Also with my eggs, sometimes we get inconsistent sizing because these are coming from my chickens when we're testing recipes before we get to filming, we always weigh them to make sure we're truly using large eggs. But when it comes time to film, I'm a little bit less strict about that. Alright, enough about my eggs, let's go ahead and crack one. Now, when I picked my chickens, I did a pick all large egg layers, but we got a couple extra large, jumbo and super jumbo layers somehow as well. Alright, we'll add in these eggs. We're also going to add a bit of vanilla extract, just a teaspoon. We'll go ahead and stir everything together again. Alright, we're going to just scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. You should do this periodically anyway in order to make sure all of your ingredients are well combined, and that is especially true if you're using a stand mixer because sometimes the ingredients like to hide on the bottom of the bowl, there’s like a little divot down there. Alright, set this out of the way. Alright, now you're going to need a separate bowl for your dry ingredients. In a separate, medium-sized mixing bowl whisk together flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda and salt. You'll want a medium or large sized bowl. And the first thing we're going to need is four cups of cake flour. If you've made my other gourmet cookies, you may have noticed I have a tendency to reach for the cake flour instead of the all-purpose. While I will include a note if you only have all-purpose and want to substitute that, I really do recommend using cake flour. The reason for this is because you're going to get a tender, more cakey cookie. It has a finer crumb. It just really works well in these gourmet cookies for giving us the texture and the—and style that I want. It's going to seem more like that pastry crust that you would get in one of those tinfoil wrapped Pop Tarts. Then, we are going to lean into those aspects that I like about the cake flour even more by adding a bit of corn starch, so we'll add two tablespoons of corn starch. Now, we're also going to be adding two tablespoons— two teaspoons of baking powder and just a fourth teaspoon of baking soda. You need a little bit of salt. This is just three fourths teaspoon of table salt. Alright, get everything nicely whisked together. Alright, let's bring back our wet ingredients and we are going to gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet. Gradually add dry ingredients to wet (in 4 or 5 parts) stirring until completely combined. So this dough is a pretty dry dough, so when I say gradually, I mean that. Don't dump all of your dry ingredients at once, or you're going to end up with a dough that’s going to drive you crazy because you're not going to be able to get the wet ingredients to absorb the dry ingredients. It's a giant pain, so add it in like four or five parts. Another thing worth mentioning about the flour is it really is important to measure your flour properly. So I have a whole post or I think I even did a video on how to measure flour properly, I'll try to remember to link to it, but you want to stirring your flour, spooning it into the measuring cup, and leveling it off. Don't ever scoop directly into the measuring cup. Or, even better, use a kitchen scale, which is what I do, and all of my recipes include metric measurements so that you can use weight instead. One of the easiest ways to go wrong is when people accidentally use too much flour, and then their dough is just dry, crumbly, and unusable. Alright, last bit of flour. I always tell people if they're looking for an easy way to level up their baking, use a kitchen scale—and fewer dishes, you don't need measuring cups anymore. Okay, let's scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. We wanna make sure all of that flour is absorbed. And, right now, this dough is a little bit sticky. Cover dough tightly with plastic wrap and transfer to the refrigerator to chill for 30-60 minutes (note I do not recommend chilling longer than this, as the dough becomes difficult to manage). So that means we combined everything properly, but what it also means is in order to manage the dough and fill it with that brown sugar filling that we're going to put in the middle, you are going to need to let it chill for a bit, so let me grab my plastic wrap. So we are going to cover this dough, and we are going to refrigerate it for thirty minutes. Another thing worth mentioning is I don't like to let this dough sit much longer than thirty minutes —you could go forty five minutes, maybe even an hour. But if it sits too long, it can be really difficult to manage and you need it to be firm, but still a little bit pliable. You'll see what I mean when we get to actually filling it. So let's go ahead and put this in the fridge and let's start making our filling. Okay, so while our cookie dough is chilling, we can make the brown sugar Pop-Tart-esque filling. While the dough chills, prepare the filling. And to do this, you're going to first need five tablespoons of softened unsalted butter. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine butter, sugar, and vanilla and stir or beat with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Put that in the bowl, along with three fourths cup of firmly packed light brown sugar. And we are going cream these ingredients together until they're smooth and well combined. The mixture will sort of look like a paste. We can add our vanilla extract in here as well. This is just a fourth teaspoon of vanilla extract—adds a little flavor without making things too rich. Next, we're going to add three tablespoons of all-purpose flour, Sprinkle flour, cinnamon, and salt over the butter/sugar mixture and stir until well-combined. one half teaspoon of ground cinnamon, because these are brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart cookies, anyway. And we're also going to add just a pinch of salt, so like an eighth teaspoon of salt if you're measuring it, and stir everything together until this is well combined. Okay, so you should have a nice mixture here that smells pretty amazing, and it should resemble a paste. Make sure everything's well combined. Nothing hiding on the bottom. And we are going to be scooping this by firmly packed level tablespoons, so I like to use my little tablespoon cookie scoop, makes nice, clean work of this. And we're going to need our cookie dough, mine has been in the fridge for exactly thirty minutes at this point, so let me grab that. Remove chilled cookie dough from the refrigerator and scoop by ¼ cup (3 oz/85g). Break the scoop in half and form one half into a nest. Firmly scoop a Tablespoon of the brown sugar filling and scoop into the nest you just made in the center of the cookie dough. Take the other half of the cookie dough, likewise form it into a flattened nest shape and form it around the top of the filling to seal the filling inside in the center (I show how to do this in the video). Make sure the filling is completely concealed and centered. Repeat until all cookie dough and filling is used. And if your dough is too sticky to manage after thirty minutes or longer, you can just refrigerate it a little bit longer. We’ll scoop our cookie dough. So I'm scooping about three ounces of cookie dough, then what I like to do is I just break this in half, set the one half aside, flatten this one, make a nice, little divot in it, go ahead and scoop our filling. This is a firmly packed tablespoon, and then sort of form the dough around it a bit, take your other half of dough, flatten that, form it around, and this is just the best way to ensure that that filling stays in the center. Roll it into a smooth ball. And of course, we're just going to repeat until we have filled all of our cookies. So I went ahead and I scooped all of my cookies, and I know a lot of you are going to ask me how much cookie dough per cookie. I am using three ounces of cookie dough per cookie. That's just for the dough. The filling is like .6 ounces. And as you're filling these, your goal should be to make sure that filling is completely covered —see, I have a little bit poking out here, no good. I’m gonna take some of my extra dough and just sort of patch that because those are our weak spots and it's not gonna be good news for us. You should get twelve nice sized cookies out of this. And obviously, at least I hope it's obvious, I'm not going to be Place cookie dough on large plate or baking sheet and place in the freezer for 15-30 minutes (see note to chill longer, this dough freezes well). (note: you may chill this cookie dough longer, for days or even weeks, just make sure to transfer the dough to an airtight container (and if I’m chilling longer than a week I individually wrap each cookie dough ball in plastic wrap before freezing). Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 375F (190C) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. baking the cookies on this tiny baking sheet. The dough is going to need to chill in the freezer for at least fifteen minutes, so I'm just putting it on this baking tray so we can do that. Okay, so these are going to need to chill in the freezer for at least fifteen minutes before you bake them, and they can certainly chill longer than that. I'm going to pop these in my freezer and while the dough is chilling, I'm going to preheat the oven to three hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. Once your dough has chilled and your oven is fully preheated, Once cookie dough has chilled and oven is preheated, remove from freezer and place on parchment paper lined baking sheet, spacing cookies at least 2” apart (I only bake 4-6 cookies at a time). Transfer to center rack of 375F (190C) and bake for 14 minutes, until the very edges of the cookies are just beginning to turn a light golden brown. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely on baking sheet (cookies are fragile when warm!) before icing. we can go ahead and transfer these dough balls to a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Make sure you space the cookies at least two inches apart, and we'll transfer these to the center rack of our three hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit preheated oven where they're going to need to bake for about fourteen minutes. You can look for the edges to be just beginning to turn a very light golden brown when they're finished baking. Now you do want to let these cookies cool completely before you ice them or before you remove them from the baking sheet. And once they've cooled, we can go ahead and prepare our icing. So my cookies have cooled. In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar, brown sugar, 1 Tablespoon of milk, corn syrup, vanilla extract and cinnamon. Whisk until smooth, adding additional milk as needed until mixture is smooth and ribbons off the whisk (the ribbon that falls should hold its shape for several seconds before dissolving back into the bowl, any thinner and it will take painfully long for your icing to set on the cookies!). You don't wanna prepare this too far in advance because when made properly, it should firm up pretty quickly. So I wait until my cookies are cooled. So for this brown sugar cinnamon glaze, we're going to start with one and a half cups of powdered sugar. And we're going to add three tablespoons of firmly packed brown sugar. Now, I really like to use dark brown sugar because it's going to give the glaze a better flavor and a better color. But if you don't have brown sugar, don't run out and buy it for this recipe, light brown sugar will work just fine —if you don't have dark brown sugar, that is. Next, we're going to add some milk. I start by just adding a tablespoon of milk. I just about always need to add more, but I like to start with less. And I'm also going to add some light corn syrup. This is a tablespoon and a half of light corn syrup. Let me grab my spatula because it likes to stick to my measuring cup. I wanna get all of that in there. The corn syrup, it is not the same thing as high fructose corn syrup. I just wanna mention that, but also, if you want to leave it out, you can. I like to use it because it gives us a firmer, shinier frosting or icing that is a lot more like what you would find on a brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart. We'll also add just a half teaspoon of vanilla extract and an eighth teaspoon of ground cinnamon. And then we just whisk everything together, and we add more milk if we need to. So we're looking for a particular consistency, and I will obviously show you that. But right now, I can tell I need a little bit more milk. Let me add a splash more. So I want an icing that's pretty thick. I don't want it to be too thin because I want it to dry nice and firm on the cookies. I usually need between one and two tablespoons of milk. This is whole milk. You could really use any milk, but whole milk is a little bit thicker. So if you use a different milk, it'll be a little bit thinner, like if you're using like a low-fat milk or even a nut milk, so you will probably need less of it. And we know we've reached the right consistency when if you lift the whisk out of the bowl, that drizzle that forms holds its shape for just a couple seconds before dissolving back into the bowl. This is holding its shape, but it's not really dissolving or it's taking more than a couple seconds, so just a little more milk. There you go. That's a pretty nice consistency. Immediately drizzle over cooled cookies. Allow to set before enjoying (note it could take up to several hours for the icing to harden completely, depending on how thin/thick your icing is). Let's go ahead and decorate our cookies. Now, something I realized about these cookies is if you eat them while the icing is still wet, they seem too sweet. I don't know exactly why that is, but if you let the glaze or the icing or frosting, if you let that solidify completely, and then you taste the cookie, it does not taste too sweet. It tastes perfectly balanced. Try it yourself, tell me what you think, but that was my experience and the experience of my taste testers—AKA my sisters. And something I wanna mention about these cookies is if you filled them properly and chilled them enough, when you flip them over, you should not be able to see anything spilling out from the bottom, there shouldn't be any filling escaping. And the bottoms should just be a light golden brown. If the filling is leaking out, then either you just didn't use enough dough, the dough was too soft, it wasn't chilled long enough, or maybe it was just not centered properly. This recipe makes a nice dozen cookies, but I'm just showing you half of them for now. Alright, do you guys wanna see what the inside of this looks like? We'll go ahead and cut into one even though the icing's going to spill a little bit. Ideally, you would be patient and you would wait for the icing to solidify completely, but I just wanna do this, so let's go ahead and cut in. Make sure you let me know if you like this recipe, if you wanna see more gourmet cookies like this. I really do love hearing from you. And if you like this one, check out my blueberry muffin cookies. They are kind of on the same level. Do me a favor though and wait until the icing sets before you try it —like I said, it's too sweet otherwise, but that is how you make these brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart cookies. They are incredible. They're a lot of fun. If you try it, let me know what you think. I always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time. Okay, go ahead and try it. Mmm! Mmm, yeah? You like that one? Are you sure you can eat the whole thing? I can eat it if you don't want to. I want to eat it. Well I want to eat a whole one. I’m hungry enough. You're hungry enough? I want the um—the one with the most icing. Okay. I don't know, I’m talking so much. Woah, got a little crazy there. Look how easy that was. That never happens. So this—oh! So—I keep saying so.