More Cookies

This is the last cookie post of 2009.

I promise.

It's just—how can I post holiday cookie pics after the holidays?

So it has to happen now.

Holiday cookie-making is like a art project in our house. Lots of paint brushes are used.

To start, you need an easy sugar cookie recipe that won't spread. Try this one. It makes buttery cookies that don't puff and totally hold their shape when baked.

I suggest you halve the recipe, because otherwise you end up with enough cookies for an army. However, the dough freezes well, so go ahead and make the whole recipe if you think you're gonna need it.

As soon as the dough is made, roll it out between sheets of parchment paper and refrigerate it that way. I find this works better than refrigerating the dough and then rolling it out, because the act of rolling out the dough can warm it up too much. It's best to cut out shapes with dough straight from the fridge.

Since we usually have friends over for cookie making/decorating, I roll it into about 8 circles and stack them in the fridge. If you have 6 people decorating and you reroll the scraps, eventually everyone will have a least 2 circles of dough to cut out and decorate as they want.

The first day, we used a tempura wash and crushed sour balls to make painted stained glass cookies. The tempura gives the cookies a beautiful jewel-like sheen.

The Vegetarian eschewed the cookie cutters and created this cookie instead. She at first said it was Alice, her friend with beautiful curly red hair.
Then she painted a mask on Alice and proclaimed her a robber.

She didn't care one whit when I admonished, as she was making the cookie, that it would never come off the parchment in one piece.

Then she proved me wrong.

The next day, we switched gears and used a glace icing, which is put on after baking. Glace icing, like all most uncooked powdered sugar icings, tastes terrible, but the kids love it and it looks great.

I'm not sure why, but I was obsessed with the goat cookie cutter this year.

Finally, I made these for the Soccer Monster's class party. He loves meringue cookies because they don't adulterate his sugary pleasure with fat or nuts or other annoying ingredients.

The mushrooms were much easier to make than I had expected. I didn't do things as fussily as the recipe suggested, and I stuck the caps and stems together with melted dark chocolate, rather than more meringue. Also, if you want a lot of these, double the recipe, because I only got about a dozen smallish mushrooms out of this. Which is great if you're decorating a Buche de Noel or something, but not so great if you want a heaping basketful.

Honestly, try these. They're fun and hard to mess up.