It’s time for The Improv Cooking Challenge with Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker again! October’s Challenge was apples and caramel and November’s Challenge was pumpkin and cream cheese.

December’s challenge: a baking or cooking recipe using this month’s two featured ingredients - egg nog and cranberries.

There are a lot of things I don’t know much about and egg nog and cranberries both would be perfect examples. I’ve never baked with them before, but they actually turned out awesome in these Eggnog Cranberry Cookies!

(Adapted from Food.com contributor RecipeNut’s recipe)

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 1/4 cups white sugar
• 3/4 cup butter , softened
• 1/2 cup eggnog
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 egg yolks
• optional: dried cranberries and/or chocolate chips

Step 1

Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg in a medium bowl.

Step 2

Cream sugar and butter together until smooth and light.

Step 3

Add eggnog, vanilla, and egg yolks to sugar-butter mixture and beat at medium speed until smooth.

Step 4

Add the flour mixture and hand mix or beat at low speed until just combined.

Step 5

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet 1 inch apart. Bake at 300 for 25ish minutes (until edges and bottom are light to medium brown).

Tip: Don’t be tempted to use a larger measurement or your cookies will burn on the outside and be undercooked in the middle.

If you want to add cranberries, drop them onto the top of your cookie before baking for cookies like these:

Or if you want the cranberries inside the cookie, just mix them into the batter for cookies like these (which have chocolate chips in them, too!):

Check out all the other great recipes from the challenge for the month of December:

Happy Baking!

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Chrissy – who has written 426 posts on The Outlaw Mom® Blog - Creative Living in a Conventional World.

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