A New Take on Celebrity Bakery's Thumbprint Cookies

For Mother's Day dessert this year, I decided to try something a little different and bake up a new rendition of my mom's favorite thumb print cookies from Celebrity Bakery. A quick search on Pinterest revealed dozens of different options for thumbprint cookies. I went for this simple, quick and easy thumbprint recipe (it also had the most pins). 

Thumb Print Cookies:

• 3/4 cup softened butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 3/4 cup flour

Preheat oven to 375 F

• Cream butter, sugar and egg together
• Gradually add flour to butter mixture
• Pinch off enough dough to form 1 inch balls
• Roll dough until balls are relatively smooth
• Place balls about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet
• Use indention in each ball with thumb or spoon
• Bake for 8 minutes
• Remove cookies from oven and place on cooling rack

Now for the icing... 

Over the holidays, I made a three layered carrot cake that had the most incredible cream cheese icing. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the recipe called for a lot more icing than was necessary for the cake. This left me with a huge bowl of leftover icing. To keep myself from eating the icing straight out of the bowl, I decided to use it on a fresh batch of sugar cookies and the result was incredible. I know that thumbprint cookies aren't traditionally made with cream cheese icing but I remembered how incredible those cream cheese frosted sugar cookies were and thought, why not do it again? I decided to use the same recipe but cut it in half and the results were just as good as I anticipated. The best part, my mom absolutely loved them!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) salted butter, softened
• 8 oz cream cheese, softened
• 3 to 4 cups powdered sugar (depending on your desired consistency & sweetness of frosting)
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Using an electric mixer, beat together the butter and the cream cheese. Slowly blend in the powdered sugar and vanilla, then beat until smooth and well-combined. 

Tip: The longer you whip this frosting, the lighter and fluffier it will become.