Ingredients
- 3 c. all-purpose flour - 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. baking soda - 1 tsp. salt
- 1/2 c. shortening - 1 c. sugar
- 2 large eggs - 1 c. sour cream- 1 tsp. vanilla extract - 2 c. powdered sugar
- 2 tbsp. softened butter - 1 tsp. vanilla
- 2-3 tbsp. milk - food coloring
*ingredients in blue are for the frosting
For the cookies: Start off by combing the dry ingredients then add in the eggs. After the eggs are incorporated in, mix in the remaining ingredients (shortening, vanilla, sour cream, sugar). When the dough is all mixed well, refrigerate for at least 2 hours so it would set. Once the dough has chilled for at least 2 hours, roll the dough out about 1/4" thick and use your favorite cookie cutters to create various fun shaped cookies.
Cutting the cookies may be the hardest part because the dough is very sticky. But as I was reading through How to Break and Egg, a collection of handy tips and techniques for the kitchen, I found some advice that helped me deal with my sticky dough much better. A contributor to the collection advised to lightly flour the edge of the cookie cutters to prevent the dough sticking to the cutter (Khosrova 197). I did as Khosrova suggested, and my cookie shapes began to turn out much more successfully as where without flouring my cookie cutters, it was hard to guess what shape the cookie was suppose to be.
Once finished cutting up the dough into shapes, bake the cookies for 15 minutes at 350 degrees F.
For the frosting: Making the frosting is the easiest part. Just grab all the ingredients, and mix them really well to create a nice smooth frosting. To color the frosting, just add in few drops of food coloring to the mixture. The amount of drops you add is up to you depending on how dark you want your color to be. The frosting itself without any coloring, turns out to be white but with a very big yellowish tint to it, which I personally think is a very ugly white to use if decorating a snowflake, or a snowman. Thankfully, How to Break an Egg, had a solution to this problem as well. Betsy suggests "to achieve a snow-white frosting, add one drop of blue food coloring to each batch of frosting" (Betsy 189).
I divided my frosting into 2 parts so I can have 2 different colors of frosting. To one of my parts of the frosting I added one drop of blue coloring, and poof! Like magic my ugly yellow tinted frosting turned snow white! Thanks to Betsy I was able to achieve perfectly white frosting very easily, since sadly there is no such a thing as white food coloring.
I used a spoon and just spread on the frosting. I am the very opposite of an artistic person so it's a very difficult task for me to spread the frosting nicely, evenly, and make designs accurately. But I'm 99% positive that your artistic skills are much better than mine, so let your creativity kick in and frost away!
These cookies are not the easiest to make when compared to cookies like chocolate chips, but they are really worth the work! The combination of soft fluffy cookies and creamy smooth frosting is almost unbearable! Don't be surprised if you make these cookies for Santa, but before Santa gets to try some, you much them all up because the temptation of these cookies is just oh, so big!
I've never figured out any other ways to frost cookies, but finding new and better ways would definitely help me in my decorating! What do you use to frost your cookies?
"Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes and Handy Techniques." Fine Cooking: n. pag. Rpt. in How to Break and Egg. Ed. Pam Hoenig.
Newtown: The Taunton Press, 2005. N. pag. Print.
These look so good! I think instead of using a spoon to frost the cookies, I would use a butter knife. It would go on smoothly and create a nice appeal. But your cookies still look great.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the advice Jasmine, I will definitely try a butter knife next time!
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ReplyDeleteMmmm, you're making me hungry! From my experience, using a spoon has always resulted in my cookies looking, well, odd. What I usually do is use a butter knife. However, I find that most of the time butter knifes don't work much better than spoons. In the rare times I've used an icing bag to ice cookies, it has always worked perfectly for me. Simply just place some icing in the bag, cut the tip off, and ice away! :)
ReplyDeleteI usually use a butter knife just because I find it helps to spread the frosting better. But when I actually try to make some designs with the frosting I always use an icing bag. Its much easier to control and to add small details to make the cookies look even more appealing to the eye.
ReplyDeleteI've made these types of cookies with my nana and family and they're so good! We usually know that they're going to turn out ugly, we haven't figured out how to make them good-looking, but taste beautiful so we don't care too much on how we frost them. We usually use a plastic bag with a hole in it to squeeze the frosting out and when we give up on that we use our fingers to make designs.
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