Stonewall Kitchen's Vanilla Sandwich Cookies

It's hot out! It's sticky! Too lazy, hot and tired to make a snack from scratch? Too busy with work lately to do a lot of your own baking? (Umm, yes that would be me...) I won't tell, whip up a batch of Stonewall Kitchen's Vanilla Sandwich cookies and it will look like you slaved all morning!

"You made these cookies for us in this heat?! Oh what a doll you are dear!"

Recently at a Stonewall Kitchen store up in Portsmouth, NH, I bought a box of these that were on the clearance shelf, can't beat 75% off :).  I wanted to make something fun for visiting some family tomorrow so I thought these would be easy. They were, and I still was able to modify it as needed and I even learned something. 

Two bags were included in the box, one with the cookie mix, and one with the filling. You need a LOT of butter for these cookies... 8 and a half Tbsp for the cookies alone...that is one stick plus half a Tbsp of butter. Mmmm butter.

Notice anything about the shape of my cookies?

Before Baking:

After Baking:

Well, they didn't spread out at all, and they are more than a little misshapen! The directions just said to slight flatten a rounded teaspoon of dough. Ummm....yeah. Ok. So, the next batch, I decided to roll the dough in between my hands, and then flatten with a spoon. Can you tell the difference?

Lesson Learned #1: Use your noggin.

Next was making the filling, which was very easy. Dump in the bag of the filling into your mixer, add 1/4 softened butter and 1/4 vegetable shortening..i.e. good old Crisco.

Crisco still freaks me out a little, but in reality it has 50% less fat than butter....cool :) So wait are these low fat cookies!?! Uhhh, no, but it makes me feel a little better that they are slightly less fattening than they could be.

The directions basically just say to mix together the Butter, Crisco, and 'filling mix'...but without any sort of liquid, it wasn't doing much of anything except getting powdered chocolate all over my kitchen. I added about a Tbsp of milk and it mixed up perfectly.

Lesson Learned #2: See Lesson Learned #1

The only thing left to do is put the sandwiches together and try a few. Oh the things I do for baking.

P.S. I love my Pyrex dish I got at Brimfield!