Here at The Mouse House, autumn is officially pie season. From pumpkin to pecan, you can almost always find me rolling out a crust at least once a week. (Stay tuned soon for a killer recipe for a showstopping Mile High Apple Pie!)

Now, if you’re like me, you’re bound to have some leftover pie dough on your hands at one point or another. (How do you like to use it up?)

Normally, I usually just cut it into strips, dust them with cinnamon sugar, and bake them off like little cookies.

Here’s a slightly spiffier alternative, which is almost as easy to throw together. This short and sweet treat makes a great fast snack for a hungry army of kids—or unexpected company.

For this cookie, I cut rounds of pie dough, fill them with whatever jam I have on hand, fold them over into half moons, and seal with egg wash.

If you’re having a cookie emergency, you can even use store-bought dough. I won’t tell. If you want to make the dough from scratch, take a peek at the crust for my Blueberry Pie here. Just cut the recipe in half unless you want a metric ton of cookies.

Other fillings

I love these cookies with plain ole raspberry jam. Here are some other ideas for fillings:

• Marmalade, dusted with fresh orange zest
• Blueberry jam, dotted with fresh lemon zest
• Nutella, sprinkled with chopped, toasted hazelnuts
• Maple sugar candy with finely chopped pecans
• Peanut butter with a tiny bit of jelly
• Fresh lemon curd

This one is more method than recipe. A regular single, homemade pie crust recipe should yield about 14-16 cookies, depending on how large you cut the rounds.

Use a biscuit cutter that’s about 3 inches across. Sprinkle with sanding sugar, if you like.

Mini Turnover Cookies

Pie dough (click here for my recipe)
A little flour for your board
Jam
1 egg, beaten
Sanding sugar, if you like

Roll out the pie dough

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Beat the egg in a small bowl and set aside. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper and set aside.

Roll the pie dough out on a floured board.

You want to get it thin, just like you would for a regular pie.

Cut the rounds

With a biscuit cutter (or a glass), cut out the rounds. I like to use a cutter with a fluted edge.

Fill the dough

Put a small blob of jam (or other filling) in the center of a piece of dough. For my 3-inch rounds, I used maybe a scant teaspoon of jam. The trick is filling them without overfilling them. (How much is too much? You’ll find out really quickly when you go to seal them and you have jam oozing out the edges. If you overfill one, don’t fret. Just open it up, remove some, and try again.)

Using your (very clean) finger or a pastry brush, paint a circle of beaten egg around the edge of the dough. This will help to keep the cookie sealed as it bakes.

Seal the cookies

Flop the dough over so that it forms a half moon. Press down on the edges to seal well. If a little jam leaks out of one corner, don’t sweat it. Just wipe it off and keep going. If a lot leaks out, open up the dough, remove some jam, wipe the edges clean, re-egg it, and seal again.

Set the filled cookie on your prepared pan. Poke a couple of small holes in the top. (These will let excess steam out as they bake.)

Repeat with the rest, until you’ve filled them all. Then ball up the remaining dough scraps, roll them out, cut more rounds, and fill those, too. (Basically, do this until you’ve used all the dough.)

Brush with egg wash & bake

Brush the tops of the cookies with beaten egg. Sprinkle with sanding sugar (or chopped nuts, depending on your filling) now, if you like. Bake for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

They’re done when they’re puffed and golden brown on the edges and bottom. When they’re done, yank the pan out of the oven.

Cool for 5 minutes on the pan, then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

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Psssst, hey, you! You need to make these. Like, now.

I almost never say that, but seriously: You do.

Stop what you’re doing, put on your fat pants, and get yourself into the kitchen. You can thank me later.

These s’mores bars are so good, they should be illegal. Think I’m kidding?

I made these and took them to a party this past weekend, and I got two marriage proposals—neither of which came from my husband.

They’re dense and chewy and have all of that good chocolate-marshmallowy-graham crackery taste that you know and love.

I put them in the fridge for a while once they cooled to room temp, which firmed them up a little and made them really easy to slice.

How to make s’mores bars

You’ve gotta love a recipe that includes 4 oversized chocolate bars and a pound of marshmallow fluff. It’s ridiculous and so happy-making at the same time.

For this recipe, you make a graham-cracker laced cookie dough. Pack half of it in a layer into a baking pan. Cover the dough with whole chocolate bars (yep, you heard me right).

Slather the chocolate with marshmallow fluff (not regular marshmallows).

Then top it with another layer of the dough.

Bake for about 30 minutes, and let them cool completely (the waiting is the hard part) before slicing.

The dough is a little tricky to work with, but I figured out a good way to handle it. Read on for the details.

Where did this recipe come from?

I found this recipe in a roundabout way. It was featured in one of Saveur’s e-mail newsletters, which led me to Risa’s blog Baked Perfection, who credited Nicole over at Baking Bites for the original recipe.

Thanks to you all! This recipe is definitely a keeper. I’m just doing my part in spreading the dessert love around the interwebs.

The only change that I made to the recipe was to increase it to fill a 9 x 13 pan. If you’re thinking: That’s way too many s’mores bars. I’ll never finish them off.

Wrong.

Invite a few friends over. See how many are left. I’m willing to bet you’ll be fighting over the last crumbs just around midnight.

Ingredients for s’mores bars

Use marshmallow fluff, or your favorite brand of marshmallow cream—not regular marshmallows. The other bakers noted that they wouldn’t melt as well. The bars were delicious, so I’m inclined to believe them.

For the graham cracker crumbs, you can smash up graham crackers (use about 7 for an 8×8 pan, or 14 for my 9×13 pan recipe below), or you can be really lazy and buy them ready made. Most grocery stores sell boxes of graham cracker crumbs in the baking aisle.

I opted for lazy, this time. (I blame Penelope.)

For the chocolate bars, use your favorite kind. I opted for the big size of the traditional Hershey’s milk chocolate bar and got rave reviews.

The gal over at Baked Perfection used dark chocolate bars, which sounds really good, too. It’s totally up to you. Basically, you need enough chocolate bars to cover the surface of a 9 x 13 pan in a single layer that’s about a quarter-inch thick. You do the chocolate math.

I used 4 (4.4 oz.) chocolate bars.

These are a ton of fun to make. Let’s get to it!

S’mores Bars

Adapted from Baked Perfection and Baking Bites

16 Tbls. butter (that’s 2 sticks), softened to room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsps. vanilla
2 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 cup graham cracker crumbs (about 14 full graham crackers)
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
4 large (4.4 oz.) chocolate bars
3 cups marshmallow fluff (that’s roughly one 16-oz. tub of marshmallow fluff)

Yields a 9-inch x 13-inch pan of bars

Serves one. (Or more, if you feel like sharing.)

Preheat your oven & prep your pan

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Lightly grease a 9-inch x 13-inch glass baking pan and line it with parchment paper, so the paper hangs over the sides a little. (The parchment will make it really easy to air lift the bars out of the pan if you want to.) Set it aside.

Make the cookie dough

Put the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar in the bowl of your mixer (or a large bowl if mixing by hand).

Cream them together until uniform.

Toss in the eggs and vanilla. Beat until the mixture thickens a little and fluffs up.

In a separate bowl, mix together the graham cracker crumbs, flour, baking powder, and salt until uniform.

Toss the dry mixture into the butter / sugar mixture.

Beat to incorporate, just until all the ingredients come together.

The dough will be soft, kind of loose, and a little mealy feeling from the graham cracker crumbs. That’s just fine.

Assemble the s’mores bars

Gather the dough into a ball. Whack it in half with a bencher or sharp knife.

Take one half, plop it in your prepared pan, and smoosh it down so that it covers the bottom of the pan completely in an even layer.

Then, unwrap all your chocolate bars. Cover the dough with a single layer of chocolate, cutting the bars as needed to fit your pan.

Don’t forget about those pesky edges. They need chocolate, too.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect fit (after all, it’s going to melt). Just do the best you can.

Next, cover the chocolate in an even layer of marshmallow fluff. (What’d I tell you? Sticky, ridiculous fun!)

Finally, you need to add the top crust. This is the trickiest part. Sort of. Grab the other half of the dough.

Smoosh it flat on a board (flour the board lightly, if you want, to make it easier to get the dough off).

Make it roughly the same size and shape as your pan, so you know it’ll be big enough to cover the whole top.

Then, slice it into strips. (The gal over at Baked Perfection recommends rolling it out in a zip-top bag, then slicing the bag off and laying it on in a single layer. You could try that, too.)

Scoop the piece up.

And lay it on top of the fluff.

Now, this is really messy looking, I know. (So messy, in fact, that I wondered at this point if the finished bars would look awful.) It’s OK. Really, it is. The dough has enough butter in it that it really kind of melts together a little in the oven as it bakes. Plus, it’s a s’mores bar. It’s kind of supposed to be rustic and messy looking.

Repeat with the rest of the dough. Your goal is to cover the fluff completely with it, leaving as few gaps as you can.

As it bakes, the fluff will bubble up a little (not a lot) through any gaps you leave.

Bake the s’mores bars!

Pop the pan into your preheated oven. Bake at 350 degrees for about 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden brown.

Yank the pan out of the oven. Let it cool completely on a rack. If you like (this is what I did), pop them in the fridge when they hit room temperature. It will make them waaaay easier to slice, and you can always nuke ‘em in the microwave for a few seconds to get them nice and gooey again.

Kitchen dog update!

As for Penelope, our new baby Keeshond, she’s doing really well.

She loves to sit and watch me cook in the kitchen—and get her nose into just about anything I’ll let her. Her favorite so far, seems to be fresh basil. She loves how it smells.

And, as you can see, she’s getting along famously with Dexter.

Cheers!

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These bars are one part cookie, and one part granola bar. And they’re one of the best homemade bars…or whatever you want to call them…I’ve ever made.

They’re chewy and caramel-y and earthy and studded with tangy, dried cranberries.

The bottom and sides are just a wee bit crisp.

And they couldn’t be easier to make. Think Rice Krispie treat, but with oats instead of rice cereal, and a sweet buttery mixture instead of marshmallow.

The only difference? These get baked.

They’re based on a recipe published in Bon Appetit magazine by the fabulous Molly Wizenberg of Orangette. The recipe is British, and was originally called flapjacks (which in England, are cookies, not pancakes). Read Wizenberg’s full article on them here.

I used dark brown sugar instead of light brown, and tossed in a mess of sweetened, dried cranberries. They were great the day that I made them, and even better the next day.

Be sure to use quick cooking oats

Use quick-cooking oats for this recipe. Not instant. Not old-fashioned.

What is Lyle’s Golden Syrup?

This stuff. It was originally made by Abraham Lyle in the 1880s, and it’s delicious.

It’s about the consistency of maple syrup or warm honey. It has a golden color, and a wonderful, light caramel flavor. (It’s really good on pancakes.)

It comes in a can, or a plastic squeeze bottle. (I prefer the bottle. It’s less messy.)

In America, you used to be able to only find it in gourmet shops. Over the last few years, however, more and more mainstream markets have been stocking it. I got my bottle at my local Stop & Shop. If you can’t find it in your area, check a Whole Foods, or order it online.

Cranberry Oat Bars

Adapted from Molly Wizenberg

8 Tbls. butter (that’s 1 stick)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup golden syrup
2 1/3 cups quick-cooking oats (NOT instant or old-fashioned)
3/4 cup sweetened, dried cranberries (a.k.a. Craisins)
Pinch of salt

Yields 8-16 bars, depending on how small you cut them

Prep your pan

Lightly grease an 8-inch x 8-inch baking pan. Line with a square of parchment paper, so that the paper is hanging over the sides. (This makes air-lifting out the baked bars a lot easier.) Set it aside. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Make the bar cookie mixture

Measure your brown sugar out (pack it down in the measuring cup with a spoon). Toss the sugar in a medium-sized pot.

Add the butter and the golden syrup.

Set the heat on medium. Whisk constantly as the butter and sugar melt.

Keep whisking until you have a uniform paste, like this. (You’re not cooking the mixture, at this point. You just want to melt the ingredients together.)

Remove the pot from the heat. Toss in the oats and the salt.

And the dried cranberries.

Stir until the oats and cranberries are coated and the mixture is uniform.

Scoop out into your prepared pan.

The mixture will be sticky, but kind of loose. That’s just fine.

Smoosh the mixture down with the back of a spoon until the surface is flat and firm.

Be sure to press down all the corners, too. You want it dense when it goes into the oven so it stays together.

Bake, cut, and cool the bars

Pop the pan into your preheated, 350-degree oven for about 25 minutes, or until the edges are light brown and it smells nice and toasty.

Cool it in the pan on a rack for about 5 minutes. Then cut them. Slice into four squares.

If you want 8 large triangles, cut an “x” connecting the corners. (If you want 16 smaller triangles, cut each square in an “x”.)

Let the bars cool completely in the pan. (They’ll kind of fall apart until they cool.) When they’re cool, break them apart to serve. You can leave the bars in the pan, or lift them out by the parchment paper.

Enjoy!

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Did anyone see Ina Garten make these on Food Network last week? I knew the minute I saw them that I had to try them.

This recipe could feed an army. Or a band of hungry ten-year-olds. Or a couple of really lucky friends.

It makes a sheet pan’s worth of brownies. If you have a strong sense of self preservation, cut the recipe in half and make it in a smaller baking dish.

These brownies are dark, fudgy, shot through with ribbons of smooth peanut butter—and dotted with bits of molten chocolate. The batter includes semisweet and unsweetened chocolate, which means that they’re sweet, but not overly so.

These brownies also have a hint of espresso in them. The espresso deepens the chocolate flavor. You can definitely taste coffee notes in the brownies, though, so if you’re not crazy about espresso flavor, use half the recommended amount.

I don’t have a sweet tooth, and I loved them. I need to work on my swirling technique (I was overzealous and some of the peanut butter disappeared into the batter).

I guess I’ll have to buckle down and make another pan. Practice makes perfect, right? (What a burden, I know.)

Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies

Based on Ina Garten’s original recipe

1 lb. butter, cut into hunks
1 lb. semisweet regular sized chocolate chips
12 oz. semisweet mini chocolate chips (substitute regular size if you like)
6 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
6 extra-large eggs
3 Tbls. instant espresso powder
2 Tbls. pure vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbls. baking powder
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 cup smooth peanut butter

Yields 20 large brownies, or a LOT more smaller ones (makes a 12 x 18 inch pan)

Melt the chocolate and butter

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Put about an inch of water in a medium-sized pot and set it on the stove over high heat so it comes to a simmer.

Put 1 lb. of regular-sized chocolate chips in a large, heatproof bowl.

Toss in the butter and the unsweetened chocolate.

When your water is simmering, set the bowl on top of the pot. Drop the heat to low.

(The bowl will cover the pot, which will be enough to keep the water simmering.)

It will take maybe 15 minutes for the whole bowl to melt (there’s a lot of stuff in there!). Stir occasionally.

(Stir, stir, stir.)

Keep the bowl on the pot until the butter and chocolate have melted completely.

Pull the bowl off the pot (carefully!) and set it aside while you deal with the eggs.

Mix the eggs, espresso, and sugar

Crack the eggs into a large bowl.

Toss in the espresso powder. (Use half the amount if you don’t want to taste it in the brownies.)

Add the sugar. Stir to combine.

You’ll wind up with a kind of slimy, coffee-colored mess. That’s just fine. (You’re stirring here, not beating, because you don’t want to mix a lot of air into the batter. More air = less dense brownies.)

Combine the chocolate and eggs

Pour the melted chocolate/butter into the eggs. Since it was sitting over simmering water, not direct heat, it shouldn’t be so hot that it scrambles the eggs. (If you do wind up with a few bits of cooked egg, just strain them out and keep going.)

Stir to combine…

…until the mixture is uniform.

Be sure the mixture is well combined at this point—and that there aren’t little pockets of egg, etc. Stir as much as you want now. Once you add the flour in a minute or two, you don’t want to stir the batter much at all. (Stirring will start to develop the gluten in the flour, which can make your brownies tough.)

Set it aside for a minute while you deal with the dry ingredients.

Combine the dry ingredients and mini chocolate chips

There’s a scant amount of flour holding these brownies together. Put the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Whisk together to combine.

Toss in the mini chocolate chips.

Mix them around to coat them with flour. This light coating of flour helps suspend the chips in the batter, so they don’t all sink to the bottom and glom together.

Finish the brownie batter

Pour the flour mixture into the chocolate batter.

Stir until just combined—i.e. all the white from the flour has disappeared. (You know how in old-fashioned recipes they say things like “beat 40 strokes?” That was to help ensure you wouldn’t overbeat.)

Pour the brownie batter in the pan

Line a 12 x 18 inch sheet pan with parchment paper. Pour the brownie batter onto the parchment.

Smooth it down with a spatula so it’s even and covers the whole pan.

Swirl the peanut butter through the brownie batter

Put several spoonfuls of peanut butter on the batter. Do it kind of evenly, but don’t make yourself nuts. (After all: A “swirl” isn’t exactly precise…)

With a knife, swirl the peanut butter around through the brownie batter. (Make kind of a figure 8 motion with the knife.)

Repeat until you’ve swirled in all the blobs of peanut butter.

Bake the brownies

Pop the pan into your preheated 350-degree oven. Bake for 30-35 minutes. You want a toothpick to come out clean. The top will be a little crackly.

Now, after they’ve been in the oven for about 20 minutes, Ina recommends picking the pan up and dropping it on the oven rack to force the air out from between the pan and the brownies. I didn’t do this (I was tempted, but didn’t want to press my luck), and they came out just fine. It’s up to you.

Cool the brownies right in the pan.

Wait until they’re at least room temp before slicing. Ina Garten recommends keeping them in the fridge.

Enjoy!

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So the other day, I posted a few pictures of my springerle cookie mold on our Facebook fan page. (Come join us!) Here it is. It’s an impressively heavy thing.

A lot of folks were interested, so I figured I’d write a little about cookie molds, their history, and include a shopping guide so you can get one (or three) for your very own.

‘Tis the season, right?

I preface this by saying: I am not a springerle expert. I do however, have a ton of fun playing with my cookie mold, as you can see by the untraditional chocolate shortbread cookies in these pictures.

For this post, I was messing around with leftover chocolate shortbread dough from the tarts I brought to Bon Appetit’s Holiday Bake-Off Party.

What are springerle cookies and where did they come from?

Springerle are pretty German cookies that are usually made around Christmas. Some of the oldest springerle molds are actually traced back to the 14th century.

In Old German, “springerle” means “little jumper” or “little knight”, which refers to how the cookies poof up in the oven. (Some folks hold that many of the early molds depicted a springing horse.)

Through history, springerle molds have been carved with all sorts of images—from animals to biblical scenes to everyday life. They’ve been used to celebrate weddings and births, served as decorations, and were even exchanged like holiday cards.

Raw dough

Baked

What do they taste like?

Traditional springerle cookies are flavored with anise oil and anise seeds.

They’re hard when they come out of the oven, but soften up if you keep them covered. They’re a little like biscotti and are great for dunking.

Wait. How the heck do you pronounce “springerle”?

Ha! Excellent question. OK. Put on your best German accent, and repeat after me: SHPRING-uhr-lee.

(Say that three times fast and try not to giggle.)

How to make springerle cookies

To make springerle cookies, a simple, stiff cookie dough is embossed using ornate molds and rolling pins that are carved out of wood or resin.

To do this, roll out your cookie dough, firmly press the mold (facing down) onto the dough, then carefully remove it.

And…presto! Your dough should have an impressive, raised picture on it. (Sorry, that’s much more exciting when I do it in person, with a flourish of flour, after a glass or two of wine.)

Cut the cookies apart carefully (or not so carefully, as you see in my example below).

Alternately, you can also roll the dough onto the mold, then peel the dough off. You stand a better chance of ripping the dough this way, though.

Connie Meisinger from House on the Hill gives a really good overview of how to make them here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

My springerle mold

Springerle molds are like little works of folk art. And like good cast iron, they’re the kind of thing that you pass down to your favorite family members and friends. (Don’t believe me? Check out the stories behind these fabulous, antique molds.)

I bought my mold at Sur La Table years ago, on sale.

They actually still sell the same one (the Vignette Springerle Mold below), plus a handful of other beautiful molds.

This is the springerle mold I have

For traditional, anise-scented springerle cookies, you let the dough dry overnight to cure a little and help preserve the details on the image.

It’s probably not proper, but I use my cookie molds with a lot of different kinds of dough, and just omit the over-night drying period. Any relatively stiff dough usually works well.

That’s chocolate shortbread dough in the pictures, which was a little on the sticky side, but still worked out just fine.

A recipe for springerle cookies

Springerele cookies are easy to make.

They only have a handful of ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, some kind of leavener (hartshorn is traditional, but baking powder is commonly used), flavored oil (anise is traditional), and anise seeds.

I’ll track down my mom’s recipe and will do a step-by-step walk through for you. For now, Martha Stewart has a great recipe here.

Springerle Cookie Mold Shopping Guide

A word of warning: Springerle molds aren’t the cheapest things in the world, especially as far as baking implements are concerned.

The great thing about springerle molds is that they’re so pretty, you can use them as decorations. When I’m not using my big cookie mold, I display it in my china cabinet (along with my growing collection of wishbones, but that’s a story for another day).

Here are some of the prettiest molds I’ve seen lately.

House on the Hill Tannenbaum Springerle Mold

Menagerie Rolling Pin

Winter Sleigh Springerle Cookie Mold

British Isles Springerle Kit

Floral-Motif Springerle Cookie Mold

Springerle Rolling Pin

Pine Cone Springerle Mold

Other springerle resources

• House on the Hill Cookie Molds
• The Springerle Baker
• The Springerle House

Four other ways to make picture cookies

There’s more than one way to put a picture on a cookie. Take a peek!

1. Shortbread molds
Shortbread molds are different than springerle molds in that the cookies are typically baked in the mold, then cut apart afterwards.

This Nordic Ware Snowflake Shortbread Pan is pretty.

Nordic Ware also makes a non-snowflake version.

This Chicago Metallic 12 Days of Christmas Cookie Mold is also kinda cool, especially if you have kids.

2. Cookie Stamps
You can also achieve the same embossed effect with cookie stamps, which work just like a regular ink stamp to press an image onto the dough.

3. Chinese moon cookie molds
Traditionally used to make cookies to celebrate the harvest moon festival, moon cookie molds work well for a variety of stiff doughs.

4. Gingerbread molds

I don’t have one of these pans, but they’re definitely on my list of things to pick up before the holidays.

Cast Iron Gingerbread Snowman Cookie Mold

Cast Iron Gingerbread Boy & Girl Mold

Small Gingerbread Cookie Mold from Taste of Home

Happy baking!

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