Oh Baby! Homemade Chocolate Espresso Whip Cream

We took MJ to the doctor this morning because he was acting a little bit funny and I thought he might have an ear infection.

I'm actually trying to get a smile out of him here. No dice. 

Welp. 

No ear infection, just super cranky teething baby, but it did get us out of the house! Which is awesome. I'm pretty happy about that. 

The weather is spectacular here today warm and sunny, just the way I like it! So in order for me to NOT spend my entire afternoon in the kitchen I'm making a simple ham with a sweet glaze for dinner with baked potatoes and... broccoli I think. Or maybe green beans. We'll see - I have both. ETA: we actually had carrots instead. Shhhh. 

ANYWAY

The point is I'm putting my effort into dessert today! We will be having sugar cookie sandwiches with homemade chocolate espresso whip cream in the middle. I'm super excited as this is something I've never made before and I kinda just made it up because it sounded yummy in my head. Here goes.

This is extremely simple and easy and OMG delicious.

Ingredients:
12 Sugar cookies (home made or store bought)
1/2 cup whipping cream
2 teaspoons white sugar
1 teaspoon hot chocolate mix
1 teaspoon instant coffee

Method:
First things first, make sugar cookies! I used an extremely basic recipe which can be found here.

So good warm out of the oven. JP and I almost polished them all off before I even made the cream!

Once you have all the cookies made you can pair them up by size so you're all ready to make sandwiches and that way you know how many are left over you can eat now... 

Next gather the ingredients for your whip cream filling. While you're doing that and munching on some warm sugar cookies you want to put your mixing bowl in the fridge so it's cool when you begin mixing.

Sugar, instant coffee, hot cocoa mix, and fresh cream

Dump everything into your pre-cooled mixing bowl.

Yes, I really whip my cream by hand.

AND WHIP! And then whip some more. And once your arm feels like falling off switch arms and whip some more only not quite as coordinatedly as your dominant arm. Once you switch back because that arm feels like it's about to fall off you should have something like this:

YUM

I like to give it a few more stirs because I prefer my cream to be slightly more substantial when I'm using it as filling. So, I end up with this:

I could totally eat this whole bowl with a spoon.

All you have to do now is assemble cookie sandwiches!

OMNOM NOM NOM!

Easily one of my most delicious, simplest, and quick desserts. I love the way they turned out! Give it a try and let me know how they turn out for you!

TIP: Use a hand mixer. No seriously, if I had one I would have used it for this... my arm still hurts. 

Also, the cream from this recipe is EXTREMELY sweet. If you want something a little less sweet I would recommend using unsweetened cocoa powder instead of hot cocoa mix OR reducing the amount of sugar by 1 teaspoon.