Christmas Cookies... I've gone to the Dark Side!

Pearlized Snowflake Chocolate Espresso Chocolate Chip Cookies

I started prepping dough for holiday baking a few weeks ago, tucking it safely and well-wrapped in my freezer.  This week, I thawed, baked, and decorated my first batch of Christmas cookies using the new  chocolate sugar cookie recipe I found on AnnClark.com.  After rolling, cutting, and baking... I gave one a try and they were rich and dark and marvelous.

The only down side is that, even with sharp metal cookie cutters, the mini chocolate chips wreaked havoc with smooth edges.  They were also "not smooth" straight out of the oven - no problem there.  I was able to use my fondant smoother and "iron out" the dips.  Nothing to be done about the edges though.  You can see from the photos that some of the edges show the problem.  However, the flavor is so exceptionally good for a roll-and-cut cookie dough, that I think I'm not going to care.  They are "rustic"...yeah, that's the ticket.

Here's the recipe with a small tweak or two that I made...plus I renamed it.  The Espresso Powder gives it the depth of flavor...I wanted that to be in the title.

Christmas Lights
accented with Wilton Silver Color Mist Shimmering
Food Color Spray over white piped icing for the bulb's base

Chocolate Espresso Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Ann Clark

Click Here for Printable Recipe

  Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
1 large egg (room temperature)
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
1 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup mini chocolate chips (I used Nestle's -
must use mini chips - you can't roll it with regular
size chips)

Method:

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat butter and both sugars until creamy.  Add egg, espresso powder and vanilla extract.  Beat until incorporated.

In a separate bowl (or large measuring cup), whisk together flour, cocoa, salt, and baking powder.

Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix just until completely incorporated.  I did this 1/2 at a time to reduce the "fly up" of dry goods.

Hand mix the mini chocolate chips into the dough.

Wrap the dough, in four portions, in plastic wrap and chill until firm (I froze them and then brought them down to the refrigerator for a day before using).  I wrap in small sections to make it easier to roll.  If you have too much, it is more prone to being uneven, cracking, and getting too warm before everything is cut out and moved over.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit   Roll the well-chilled dough out on a lightly floured surface.  Ensure your rolling pin is well-floured as well.  This dough can be sticky if not well-chilled.  Using metal cookie cutters (you need the sharpness to cut through the chips) cut the dough and transfer cookies onto baking sheets lined with parchment or a Silpat.  If they stick to the counter at all, use an offset spatula dipped in flour, sliding underneath the cutout, to help you make the transfer.  Because I have a warm kitchen, I almost always pop the trays into the freezer after the cut-outs are ready, for 5 to 15 minutes, to re-chill the butter (helps prevent spreading).

Bake cookies for 8 to 10 minutes (mine took about 9 minutes, except the large snowflakes, which took the full 10 minutes). The surface of the cookies look dry and set when they are ready.  Remove from oven and place baking trays on cooling racks for 10 minutes or so, then transfer cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

I did re-roll my scraps - and they seemed to work just fine.  I actually used the last bit of dough left to form a free-style cookie as a tasting cookie.  Since it was a new recipe, I wanted to make sure they tasted good before I spent hours decorating them!  Delicious they were!!! (Did I just sound like Yoda?)

Christmas Reindeer
Oops I forgot to pipe their black hooves!
I'll do that before I package them.

I iced all of these cookies using my regular royal icing.  I have become a huge fan of the AmeriColor Meringue Powder.  It seems to taste better than the Wilton brand...but Wilton is absolutely fine too, I have both in my cabinet.  I flavored this batch with a mix of almond extract and pure vanilla extract.  I wasn't worrying about a pure white color so I didn't use the clear vanilla (actually, I rarely do - I like the real deal).

Mittens
The little lines for the cuff were
harder to pipe than I thought...and already
a couple of lines crumbled a bit.
Live and learn...I learn something from every project!

I did break one snowflake when piping and flooding.  In retrospect, I probably should have used a medium sized cutter for all cookies with this dough.  It is not as "hard" as regular sugar cookies.  These are not cookies I would feel free to bang on the table to help them smooth themselves out.  These are hold-and-shake cookies....of course, that's how I broke the snowflake, so I'll leave it to you to figure out how to smooth things along.

Snowflakes
I outlined and flooded these with a slate blue icing.
Then I pearlized them by spraying with Wilton's Pearl Color Mist.
Piped on the detail with white 20 second+ icing and
accented with blue sugar pearls.  I am quite happy with them!

This recipe will now be a stock recipe for cookie decorating.  I feel it is so important that pretty cookies really taste good.  Otherwise, what's the point???

OK - now that I've photographed the cookies, time to package them up and put them in the freezer.  What?  You didn't know you could freeze decorated sugar cookies?  Oh yes you can...and they taste just as good as the day I put them in (I don't leave them more than a few weeks).  It would be impossible to bake and decorate without stress if I didn't have a freezing option!  I follow the instructions found at Bake at 350's blog.  Believe me, it was a game changer for me!  The only problem is that I need a bigger freezer now!  Oh well, details...just details!

Christmas Ornaments
My hands were really tired, as evidenced by
some shaky lines and slanting sections
that were intended to be straight!

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!

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Carole's Chatter:  Food on Friday Christmas Favourites

Halloween Cookies

As previously reported, life is rather hectic right now and baking and blogging are still on a back burner.  I did, however, find time to bake off some Halloween cut-outs using LilaLoa's chocolate sugar cookie recipe and popped them into the freezer for later decorating.  It's taken me over a week, off and on, to get this first batch decorated.  The stress of life-at-the-moment is unfortunately evident in shaky hands!  I made myself have fun with these instead of getting all worked up over imperfections.  I delivered a couple of the first batch (pumpkins) to local friends.  The rest of these will be for the hubs and teen...and a box will be delivered to my grand kids in Austin.  I am having my first foray into freezing decorated cookies.  Fingers crossed.

I've never used this much black royal icing before...I am envisioning black teeth on everyone eating them...but that's all in the Halloween spirit, right???



Creepy spiders and huge spider webs
 

Fall pumpkins

Poor bats - some of their wings don't match right and left...but
I didn't notice until I was finished...oh well!

Bristle-tailed cats - I wasn't sure if they were mean or scared once
I got finished with them!

Ever wonder what the difference in plastic and metal cookie cutters is?
Look at the not-so-crisp edges of the owl (plastic and shallow cutter)
vs the edges of the spider and web below (metal and deep cutter).  It really
does make a difference.
 

I got this set FREE as a winner in a contest on Facebook.
Sweet Art Factory and Karen's Cookies are my favorite
online product providers for my baking needs!  They
also have great tutorials and YouTube videos to help
me along!!!

I have another batch of dough in the fridge - just regular sugar cookies.  I realized I didn't have good cookie cutters for Halloween - mostly plastic.  I like crisp edges.  So, I am expecting a delivery today of 18 new Halloween cutters...all metal!  I sure hope my next batch pays off with sharp edging (and a less shaky hand!)

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!

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Lighthouse and Starfish Cookies

I only decorated three lighthouses ...so I don't have a lot to show.  It was hard to get them cut out and transferred...anything with a small tip tends to be a challenge, especially in a warm kitchen.  Mostly, I was focused on patriotic cookies, however, I managed to get 4 lighthouses cut out successfully, unfortunately breaking one after it was baked.

The starfish tale has already been told.  It's pretty straight forward. 

Pipe the outline, flood, dry for a couple of hours, pipe large dot in the middle, then progressively smaller dots down the legs, add sugar pearls to the center and immediate surrounding slightly larger dots, dry overnight before stacking.  Ta da! 

Simple and I really love them.  This time I did use a different color - I mixed peach and yellow to get a color that could be used for the light in the lighthouse as well as the starfish.  Worked great!

My instructions for decorating this basic lighthouse are below each photo.  The Port Isabel lighthouse is a simple white lighthouse...and it sits on a grassy knoll. That's where the similarity between reality and cookie ends.  I should have checked a photo for details if I wanted it to be accurate, but I didn't...left off little windows, the top should have been black...and there's a staircase by the door I could have added.  Oh well... next time!

I piped and filled the crown, outlined the circles at
top and bottom, and filled the middle .
Left to dry overnight

The intent of the line piped across the top "circle"
was to make it look like the walk-around section
at the top of the lighthouse.
The under color of the dark cookie was to
represent the railing (in my mind).
I filled the base "circle" to give it some
dimension and then I filled in the
area representing the light shining in
the lantern room with the
blend of icing I made for the starfish.

After everything was thoroughly dry I piped some dark gray
vertical lines to create windows in the lantern room area. 
Outlined below the cap, above and below the top railing,
and along the top and bottom of the base. 
I piped a door above the base.
The grass was supposed to look more like grass.  I used a Wilton tip #233
that supposedly was for making grass.
I guess my icing wasn't thick enough because it
ended up looking like fancy stars.  Oh well. 
From a distance it looks like grass.
Sort of.

That's it for phase two of the tropical cookies on chocolate sugar cookie bases.  Remember to check out LilaLoa's blog for that yummy recipe.  I have more dough to bake - both chocolate (just a bit left) and vanilla (an entire recipe).  It may need to be sent to the freezer.  I have more coastal cookie cutters sitting out waiting for my attention as well....  Unfortunately, I have a lot going on for the next 10 days...so I might be disappearing again!  You may be assured, however, I always show up again!

The jellyfish post can be found via this link

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!

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Making Jellyfish Cookies

I've had, for a while, this jellyfish cookie cutter that I won (along with several other cutters!) on a Facebook Giveaway from Sweet Art Factory a few months ago.  I haven't really baked and decorated cookies for fun since Easter.  I did make some baby shower cookies, but that was for an event...not just the pure pleasure of it all.  Sooooo, my goal this past week was to make some patriotic cookies to celebrate the July 4th holiday, and, use one or more of my new cookie cutters!  I started with jellyfish, star fish, and a few light houses (since I live near a town with a light house, it seemed the right thing to do)!  The jellyfish cookie cutter was from the Sweet Art Factory Beach and Nautical collection.

Since it was part of my winning bundle, let's start with the jellyfish.  I wanted it to be "sort of" real looking... but not necessarily anatomically correct.  I saw lots of examples of happy jellyfish, plain jellyfish, and fancy jellyfish as I trolled the internet...but, not what I was looking for.

I found a photo that looked pretty - I was looking for the blues that appear almost iridescent.  I don't want to steal any one's work, so I'll link you to the photo I tried to imitate (well, I guess I should say it was the inspiration - because it doesn't really look anything like my cookies look).

I started with a chocolate sugar cookie from fellow-blogger, LilaLoa.  I liked the flavor and the dark color as a background.  I am not posting her recipe because I didn't alter it at all, so please stop by her blog and check it out.  She is a great cookie decorator and her writing style is very entertaining.  You won't be sorry.

Back to the jellyfish.  So, I baked off just 7 of that shape.  Like the patriotic cookies, I had to wait a couple of days to get the right "atmospheric conditions" for using royal icing.  I knew this cookie would require a couple of days of "patience".  I sketched a pencil mock-up of the cookie components and how I would layer it up - laid out a time frame to ensure adequate drying time.  Since I started with these cookies, I was actually able to do the base coats over the course of one day...starting early and finishing late. 

I used a sky blue from Americolor, then a darker mixture of sky blue, royal blue and one drop of black (all Americolor)...and then I took some white and added it to the sky blue - just squeezed it straight into the piping bag and squished it around (kind of wanting it lighter and marbled looking), and then last, white for tentacles.  Sound confusing?  Yep, me too, that's why I wrote it all out in advance.

First, and foremost, I will again state...not anatomically correct - simply wanting to make it look "real" vs "cartoonish" and impeded in that quest by the limitations of this basic cookie cutter shape and my eye's inability to see dimension (or how to create dimension).  I am simply NOT an artist.   I view the cookie decorating more as crafting.  My high school art teacher tried to help me be a better artist...but I think I was pretty much one of those students she just helped get through the class!  So, with those points straightened out.  I began.

I outlined and filled the top of the bell cap (uh, the aboral surface?) and the poor attempt at making it 3-d with icing (really hard) by piping the bottom part of the cap with the same color.  Used the sky blue for that. 

I allowed it to dry several hours then filled in the darker shade of blue to represent the lower under inside of the bell cap.  That's not how it ended up looking...but that was the intention.  Allowed to dry a few hours also. 

Then, I did the marblized blue and white section where the tentacles would go.  It didn't look as marbled as I had expected. 

If you looked at the photograph, you saw there were some big thick things hanging down from the center of the underside of the bell cap ...the manubrium?  Then, white hangy down things...which I call tentacles...but I am not sure what they are called exactly.  I had to fit all that into the little cookie section obviously meant for "tentacles".

The next morning I piped white tentacles on the designated tentacle area.  Several hours later, I mixed up some dark gray icing. 

I piped small dots all over the "top" of the bell cap and drew a line across the bottom of the upper blue section. Then I used a damp paint brush to "shade" down towards the center of the darker blue middle part.  Confused much?  I was.  I found I didn't like the look of the manubrium...and left it off half the cookies.  It just looked sort of ugly to me.  (shrug)

Last, but not least, I very lightly sprinkled some disco dust over the cap to give it the iridescent look I was going for.  Unfortunately, it doesn't show as well in the photos...but "in person" it looks just the right kind of sparkly.

It was a satisfying project...wouldn't want to do a boat load of these cookies, but they did what I wanted them to do.  They looked pretty on the cookie tray I think.  Well, hmmm...now that I look at them, they might be mistaken as aliens.  I'm going to have to make more of these because I already see changes I would make. 

So, next will come the lighthouses...when I get around to writing it up :-)

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!

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Happy Birthday U.S.A.

I've been watching all of the cookie decorators I follow making beautiful patriotic themed cookies in preparation for the 4th of July.  I've never decorated cookies for 4th of July because, in the younger years, we were always at the lake, having a picnic, a cook-out, or ... well, heck, I didn't decorate cookies back then unless they were slice 'n' bake with sprinkles on top.  In recent years, it's too darn hot to decorate cookies in July.  However...this year, I felt the lure of the red, white, and blue royal icing.

So, I got the idea that I wanted to find one of the great chocolate sugar cookies I've seen many of the cookie decorators use.  The colors look particularly nice on the dark background and the thought of a chocolate cookie sounded really nice.  I selected the recipe I found on a favorite baker, LilaLoa's blog.  Here's the link.  It is a very, very tasty cookie...such a nice change from regular sugar cookies (although, I do love vanilla sugar cookies).

My inspiration for the star cut-outs were from
Glorious Treats and Sweet Sugarbelle - two of
my favorite cookie decorators!!!

So, I made a batch of chocolate cookie dough and wrapped it in 4 portions and put it in the fridge.  It was too stinking hot to turn on the oven.  I waited another day.  Still hot - but I decided to roll anyway.  It was unbelievably humid to boot...the rolling process was "challenging" to say the least.  I ended up rolling between parchment paper and putting the cut dough in the freezer, on the parchment paper, before removing them to the cookie sheets.  It's the same sort of texture as the gingerbread cookies I made at Christmas, and I found even a few minutes in the kitchen with a pre-heated oven made this dough horribly sticky.  So, I immediately hopped to the process I used in December...and it worked very well.  Once they were baked off, I let them cool on racks and moved them to a container, separated by wax paper, in the hopes of reduced humidity the next day.  Well... no luck...it poured buckets and was 95% humidity even when it wasn't raining.  So, I waited.

I made the base icing on Saturday night, mixed colors and began decorating on Sunday (wishing desparately that I had a food dehydrator, also recommended by LilaLoa's blog) to ensure appropriate drying of the icing.  Since I didn't have one, and the temperature was more manageable...I used Ann Smith's "turn down the a/c" trick - and everything worked out pretty darn well!

I learned I'm not all that good at piping straight lines...for stripes.  I can NOT pipe a star free hand worth beans.  I can pipe a bunch of dots thanks to my PME 1 and 1.5 tips... and I enjoyed playing with colors to obtain two different shades of blue.  I messed up a few (but the beauty of cookies is you get to eat the mistakes!) and only rolled about a dozen for this project.  Pictures below of how it all came together.

Cut out mostly squares and circles and then cut some stars
from the middle of some circles - I was ready to decorate!

The first set the second morning

The second set after layering on some more detail

I tend to enjoy feathering - and these reminded me of fireworks

Happy 4th of July U.S.A.!

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