Stuffed Red Velvet Cookies

Red velvet cake has four essential characteristics. Tang from cultured dairy, acidity from vinegar, cream cheese, and enough cocoa that you can actually taste it. To transform this into a cookie, there are a couple changes we need to make to get the flavor right, but maintain a good cookie consistency.

This is where we get creative. Using buttermilk gets tricky, because too much moisture makes cookies cake-y. Vinegar is also a no-go, because it contains moisture and because it’ll activate our baking soda before it even gets into the oven and neutralize it. There are solutions, though. These come in the form of powders — Buttermilk Powder, and Citric Acid powder. The buttermilk powder itself doesn’t carry the same acidity that comes with cultured buttermilk, but it does provide the lactic flavors of buttermilk. The citric acid powder stands in for the acidity in the buttermilk, won’t immediately activate the baking soda because there won’t be enough moisture, and it’ll provide the tang you’d expect from the vinegar as well.

You could have these in your pantry right now. Most likely you don’t. Buttermilk powder is available in most grocery stores, and you can occasionally find citric acid. When in doubt, amazon has you covered. Just make sure the citric acid you get is food-grade; It also sold as a cleaner and that may not be safe for consumption.

There’s still something missing though. How do we get cream cheese into our cookies? I know this isn’t a requirement for some folks, and there are valid arguments against the idea Red Velvet cake must have cream cheese frosting. I do not care. My platonic ideal of Red Velvet Cake requires it. We have a problem, though. Cream cheese contains enough moisture that adding it directly to the dough, perhaps in place of butter, that it would cake-ify our cookie as well.

If it were still 2015 we could go to Kroger and grab a bag of Greek Yogurt Chips and throw them in the batter like chocolate chips. We don’t live on that timeline, and Kroger stopped carrying those. We could swirl them with cream cheese frosting, or top them with it, but that feels like the easy way out to me.

So, we’re gonna fill them with frosting. We’re going to make the frosting and make the dough. We’re going to roll the portioned dough into little circles like a Bao, drop some frosting inside, and close the dough around it. I promise it works, and it’s worth it.

If you really don’t want to fill them, you can just make the cookie dough and frost it after they bake, or drizzle some melted frosting on top.

Ingredients

Cream Cheese Frosting Filling

• 4 oz Cream Cheese softened
• 5.5 oz Confectioner’s Sugar
• 1 tbsp All-Purpose Flour

Red Velvet Cookie Dough

• 4 oz Unsalted Butter
• 4 oz Light Brown Sugar
• 2 oz White Sugar
• 1 oz Natural Cocoa Powder (not Alkalized or Dutch cocoa)
• 1 oz Buttermilk Powder
• Red Food Dye (optional)
• 1/2 tsp Citric Acid Powder
• 2 tsp Vanilla
• 1 large Egg
• 6.25 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/4 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tbsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt

Directions

Make the Frosting Filling

1. Beat the cream cheese, confectioner’s sugar, and all-purpose flour together until smooth.

Make the Cookie Dough

1. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and preheat your oven to 375ºF.
2. In a small bowl dissolve the citric acid powder in the vanilla extract. It could take a while to dissolve, but stick it out. Undissolved grains of citric acid will cause some brown splotches in the dough. They won’t hurt you, but those bits will be more acidic and they don’t look pretty, so dissolve that citric acid.
3. In one large bowl, whisk together the All-Purpose Flour, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt.
4. In another large bowl, melt the butter, and stir in the light brown and white sugars. If using Red Food Dye, add it here and stir until the color is evenly distributed. The cookies will be brick-ish without dye, but they won’t be red, so I use it.
5. Add the cocoa powder and buttermilk powder and mix to combine.
6. Add citric acid and vanilla extract solution, and stir to combine.
7. Add the egg, and stir until homogeneous.
8. With a rubber spatula, fold in the flour mix. Mix until there’s no visible dry flour left. Because there’s so little moisture in this dough, gluten formation will happen very slowly, so overmixing isn’t a huge concern.

Portion, Fill, and Bake

1. Portion the dough into 2oz balls and set aside.
2. Flatten one of the dough balls between your hands, and place 2 tsp (approx. 10g) of our cream cheese filling in the center. Pull the dough up and around the filling, and close the seam. Place each filling cookie dough ball seam-side down on a parchment-lined baking sheet, allowing 2” between each cookie to account for spread in the oven.
3. Bake on the middle rack of your oven for 11-14 minutes until the edges are set, and the top of the cookie still looks a bit puffy and steamy, but the surface looks dry.
4. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely on the pan, do not remove to a cooling rack, the filling makes these a bit softer than some cookies and they are best left to set and firm up on the pan.