Sugar High Friday #31- Neutral Territory

This month's theme for Sugar High Friday, an event created by Jennifer at Domestic Goddess, is very clever in my opinion. Tara at Seven Spoons is hosting this round with the theme of Neutral Territory, meaning sweet things in the brilliant or soft shades of white. My favorite cookie just happens to be the creamiest shade of ivory. Now, I can't claim to have created these cookies. I discovered them on baking sheet, now Baking Bites, right before this past Thanksgiving. I baked up a batch to take to our family dinner and they were a huge hit. In fact, the cookies were gone before we even had Thanksgiving dinner! I made a double batch for Christmas, and the kids were over the moon for them. If they asked for a cookie, despite the wide variety available, they meant my cookies. So I just can't be more grateful to Nicole for putting that recipe up. These cookies are easy and quick to pop out of the kitchen, making them even more appealing. Not to mention that the possibility for variations are endless, as many flavors of cheesecake exist, you can create it's cookie counterpart. But, as many different additions I've thought of, I've never gotten around to messing with them. This cookie is perfect just the way it is, in my opinion.

Cheesecake Cookies
Recipe from Baking Bites
1/2 cup of cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter, softenend
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup all purpose flour

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
• In a large bowl, beat together softened cream cheese and butter. Gradually beat in sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and salt.
• In a small bowl, whisk together flour and baking powder, and mixing by hand or at low speed, add to cream cheese mixture.
• Drop by rounded tablespoon full onto prepared baking sheet.
• Bake for 12-14 minutes until the bottom edge just barely turns brown.

My notes: The recipe doesn't really specify salted or unsalted. I use salted because I like that bit of saltiness against the sweet of the sugar and cream cheese, despite the 1/4 teaspoon salt you also add. And I use neufchatel cheese, which has 1/3 less fat than regular cream cheese. Personally, my oven's temperature means I take the cookies out after about 10 minutes. I use two baking sheets, so that I can set one on the rack to cool, while the other one is in the oven. These cookies are very soft, so allowing them to cool on the cookie sheet before transferring to the wire rack let's them set up a bit.