Christmastime Recipes Seasonal

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off | Twinspiration

We’re staying in LA for Christmas this year so we decided it was a good time to start some traditions of our own! You know we love baking but we don’t do it as often as we should. We decided that a great way to try out some new recipes was to have a cookie bake-off! The four of us (Carli, myself, and our boyfriends) had to find a cookie recipe, make it and serve it. We then ranked each other’s colonies. Three points to the favorite, two points to second best, and one point for the worst.

We thought it would be fun to share the recipes we made with you because they turned out great! I’ll share them from best to worst:

Britta’s Cookies: Confetti Cake Batter Cookies

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off | Twinspiration

I knew going with something ‘cake batter’ flavored would be a hit. After all, the key to a cookie bake-off is to play to your audience. I always wanted to make a classic “gooey” cookie so this recipe seemed like the perfect one to try! The batter was pretty simple to make, and I knew chilling the dough for as long as possible would make for gooey, fluffy cookies. The hard part was rolling the sticky dough into balls and then covering the balls in powdered sugar. I didn’t want to use too much powdered sugar because then the cookies would be too sweet, but too little sugar and I wouldn’t get the sought after “cracks.” Well they turned out great and I was pretty proud to win our first annual cookie bake-off!

Carli’s Cookies: Cranberry Bliss Bar Cookies

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off | Twinspiration

If you’re like us, you wait for the Cranberry Bliss Bars to come back to Starbucks each and every year. We’ve truly never tried anything like them, so when we stumbled on this recipe for a cookie version, Carli knew right away she had to try it. Her cookies were definitely the hardest in terms of ingredients.T here were quite a few ingredients involved which made room for error. She had an issue with melting the white chocolate and had to run to the store mid-bake-off for more. The outcome was great though, and these cookies taste SO similar to the iconic bars from Starbucks!

Tommy’s Cookies: The Best Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off | Twinspiration

Tommy lives for a good chocolate chip cookie so it was no surprise he wanted to make his own for our bake-off. Believe it or not, he had never made dough in all of his 30 years on earth, so this bake-off was super ambitious for him in general but he was a good sport about it, to no surprise. The texture of his cookies was almost cookie-dough-like, so good! However, he left out the brown sugar accidentally so the taste was just missing something. Overall, the cookies were still delicious!

James’ Cookies: Nutella Swirled Peanut Butter Cookies

First Annual Cookie Bake-Off | Twinspiration

As you can probably tell from the photo, James’ cookies didn’t turn out as expected. He initially found a different peanut butter cookie recipe but it didn’t include butter or flour so he second-guessed the recipe and decided to go with another one last minute. He said as soon as the dough was finished he could tell it looked dry but hoped it would look better once chilled. We’re not sure what went wrong but the cookies had the texture of sand, even though the taste was fine. Peanut butter is always safe. Still, he tried and that’s all that matters since it was just a fun competition for us!

Which cookies look the best?

xx, Britta