Irish Cream Filled Cookies

As mentioned a previous post, Rachelle and I took a baking class at my local grocery store, Loblaws. I blogged about the much raved about biscotti, now here's the second thing we baked in the class; Irish Cream filled Cookies.

Cookies:

• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 oz. semisweet chocolate melted, slightly cooled (2 baker's chocolate squares)
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup flour
• icing sugar
  

Cream Cheese filling:

• 1 oz cream cheese, softened
• 1/3 cup icing sugar, sifted
• 1 oz semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled (1 baker's chocolate squares)
• 1tbsp Irish cream (Baileys) or Strong coffee
  

Chocolate icing:

• 3 oz semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
• 1 tsp butter
  

Cookies:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. In a bowl, whisk egg, egg yolk, sugar, chocolate, oil, baking powder, and vanilla.
3. Add flour and mix until combined
4. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1-2 hours or until firm
5. Remove from refrigerator and shape into 1/2 inch balls
6. Cook for 6-7 min on parchment paper
7. Allow to cool and dust with icing sugar
   

Filling:

1. In small bowl, with electric mixer, mix cream cheese, icing sugar, chocolate and irish cream until combined.
2. Spread 1/2 tsp of filling on the flat side of a cookie and cover with another cookie.
   

Icing:

1. Melt chocolate and mix it with butter. Allow to cool.
2. Place in ziplock, snip very small hole int he corder and drizzle chocolate onver cookies.
   

These little cookies are really cute, and festive. Our chef had some on display at the class where these cookies were placed in a nice gift box and wrapped in cellophane paper. When I first saw them, I mistook them for Macaroons. Since we only had limited time in the class, we only had enough time to make one batch of cookies, which resulted in maybe 15 cream filled cookies. So we didn't have too many to share with people at work. But the few people who had it were quite impressed with them. I love these recipes that look hard to make, but are in fact as easy as baking a simple batch of cookies.

I had planned on making these when a co-worker approached me to bake something to encourage people at work to give things to the food-drive, but i guess not many people wanted to volunteer to give free food for people to give other free food to the poor... so it was canceled.