this weekend, we celebrated a 40th wedding anniversary in the family. i made tiny heart shaped cookies and decorated some of them with red (40th is ruby) icing and sprinkles.
ingredients:
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup flour
- 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 1 tbsp milk
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
i mixed the sugar and butter until it was well combined, then added the egg to blend in. finally added the remaining ingredients. i chilled the dough, covered, for 2 hours in the fridge. then rolled it out and started cutting hearts. i put them on a parchment-lined baking sheet, and into a preheated oven at 375 F (190 C). since the cookies were small, i checked on them at about 5 minutes. i didn’t want burnt antlers like last time.
sugar cookies are a little more time consuming than drop-dough cookies. the dough in sugar cookies is usually chilled (though there are recipes that don’t require that step), then rolled out onto a floured surface before using a cookie cutter to cut the shapes and transfer them onto the baking tray. just when you think you’re done, you make a ball out of all the bits of dough that are left over after cutting out your shapes…
…roll that out again, and you get even more cookies made. it’s almost never-ending, but i find all that rolling and cutting kind of fun actually. though i recently read a comment on wilton’s website by a reader who shared her tip. i thought i’d put it here in case anyone wanted to try a different method:
I don’t like making roll-out cookies at all, so when I do make them, I don’t want to fight the dough. I rolled out portions of this dough directly on pieces of parchment paper, cut my cookies, and then peeled away the unused dough. I then slid the parchment paper, complete with cookies waiting to bake, right onto my cookie sheets. Yes, you have to roll it out several extra times because you can’t cut the cookies right up against each other. However, it keeps the edges absolutely sharp AND keeps the cookies from getting skewed because you’re not having to move the cookie dough once it’s been cut out. Hope that helps. — shanchel on wilton.com
i might try that next time.
as for decorating the cookies, i put sprinkles on about half of them before baking, and for the others, i let them cool on a rack first before icing.
now i don’t know about you, but the quality control standards in my kitchen are very strict. a disfigured cookie such as this one…
would never pass my inspection. luckily, i have a solution for fixing such mistakes.
there. problem solved ;-)
