Its Christmas time people and you know what that means, COOKIES and making memories decorating them! As a little girl I loved making Christmas cookies with my Mom. It meant she would slow down for five minutes and get messy with us kids. She would sprinkle flour out on the table and roll out that cold dough and let us go to town. My favorite thing about it was, no matter how ugly they turned out, my Mom would declare it was the prettiest Christmas cookie she had ever seen! Thinking of those memories made me want to share some of my favorite tips and tricks about sugar cookies and decorating them. In the giving spirit, I want to inspire all of you to make those memories with your children during the best time of year. Christmas! To start, of course you need some awesome cookie cutters. A great site for all your cookie decorating needs is www.cheapcookiecutters.com For the more “unique” cookies cutters out there I would try my favorite site in the world, that takes all my money www.etsy.com is basically eBay for the do it yourselfers out there. The Pan Handle in down town Granbury, Texas has my favorite local selection of cookies cutters.
Find a good Short bread recipe rather than Sugar cookie. Short bread will be stronger and hold its shape better. You can also add a bit of festiveness to your dough by adding a few table spoons of nonpareil’s sprinkles! Before you roll out your dough let it sit in the fridge as long as possible. These recipes usually have butter in them and the warmer your dough is the harder it will be to work with and it tends to fall apart easier. Trying out a new recipe? Try making small batch first and bake 3 or 4 cookies. This will let you know if you need to adjust the baking time. This has saved me from disaster many times!
Shortbread Cookies: 2 cups all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature 1/2 cup powdered (confectioners or icing) sugar 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract Choose gel based food colors over water based to color your icing. Water based food coloring can mess with your icing consistency especially trying to reach dark richer colors and also have a tendency to bleed. Always test your colors before you go crazy. Sometime while wet a color will be light but dry darker. Mixing colors can help you get darker colors faster. Adding ingredients such as cream of tartar or meringue powder will help your icing reach a brighter white. And last but not least… Use a paddle or beaters to mix and not whisks! This would put too much air into the icing. You can play with the consistency of your icing by adding more powder sugar to get it thicker or more egg white to thin it out.
Royal icing: 3 cups confectioners' sugar 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar 2 egg whites, beaten I hope these tips helps you from having to lie to your kids and tell them their ugly Christmas cookie is the prettiest one you have ever seen! Most of all I hope you all have a MERRY CHRISTMAS!
