Carrot Cake Cookies

These cookies are dangerously good.

I recently made a batch for a friend I wanted to thank. And what says thank-you better (and bigger) than homemade cookies (with a frosting!!)? 🙂 I knew she loved carrot cake, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and Cinnamon Roll Cake so I had a good idea of flavors to play with — and this cookie recipe has a mix of all of those flavors. But I wanted to revisit carrot cake rather than going with the classic layer cake version. And I actually think these are better than cake. If you like cookies over cake, you may say the same thing. Plus, you don’t need a fork and they’re already the perfect size.

They bring the warm cinnamon, flecks of carrot, and signature cream cheese frosting, all of which you’d expect in your typical slice of carrot cake. I decided to add the pecans just to the topping, instead of incorporating them into the batter. It keeps the cookies super soft and carrot forward, while adding a nice texture (and appearance & taste) to the cream cheese frosting.

Fortunately and unfortunately, I only had one cookie before sending them off to my friend! If you have someone to thank, these will do it for you. And if you don’t have anyone to thank, well, you’ll have 20 delicious carrot cake cookies to enjoy :-p Feel free to omit the frosting if you don’t want the extra sweet or if you want to make them more of a breakfast cookie. 🙂