Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - My Christmas Cookies Experience |
After having found a great Christmas cookie cutter about a month and a half ago, I decided I'd make a full scale attempt at making Christmas cookies, which seems to be very popular in the US.
I'd been searching for a penguin shaped cookie cutter for a long time and found one online, only to discover that the store was in fact a local kitchen/cookware shop in Chapel Hill. I picked up two from the shop, just in case one was rubbish or it got destroyed while being handwashed.
I made sugar cookie dough. To get from making the dough to the finished, iced and decorated involves many steps so I did this over a 24 hour period (including overnight). It's basically:
1) make the dough
2) chill the dough
3) cut out the cookies from the dough
4) bake the cookies
5) cool the cookies
6) make the icing (American style royal icing. I'm sure this is not the recipe my Mum uses).
7) ice the cookies with the white royal icing. I don't think I need to tell you that penguins are black and white.
8) before this white icing sets, pop the eye on the penguin. I didn't mess around with tweezers as my recipe book suggested. I think there's some leeway about the exact position of the eye. It's not like I'm going to stick its eye on its wing.
9) let the white icing set hard and dry.
10) I cheated with the black icing. Post-Halloween, a local grocery store was selling off pouches of black icing at a knockdown price so I picked up two pouches for the sole purpose of making these penguin cookies. Finish off icing the penguin with black icing.
11) let this black icing set. This took a good few hours.
Here's some of the finished penguins. No two look alike:
I had a large amount of this sugar cookie dough so I made some star shaped cookies and decorated them with mini and full size dragees. Here they are:
I'd had much positive feedback on the Andes mint chunk cookies I made last year so that was one was recipe I was going to use again.
I made the full batch and ended up with 48 cookies! They're only about 1.5" in diameter so they aren't that big really. Here they are:
I've heard of friends who spend all night baking their Christmas cookies. I don't do that. I just break up the baking into manageable parts.
The next entry should be about getting the cookies to recipients. I certainly did not bake all this for myself!
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About Me
Former Londoner, now living in Durham, NC since 2002.
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