Cookie pictures and recipe!

My sister in law's sister in law's (That's right, my sister in law's sister in law) baby shower is tomorrow. It has a mustache theme, and while I won't be going, (my guy and I have plans for our one year) I did promise to make cookies.

So last night and this morning I made mustache cookies.

The original plan was to use the mustache cookie cutter I had manipulated in December when I was making all my friends cookies, but...

... I lost every cookie cutter I used in December. I'm positive they're somewhere in the house, but December was so hectic for me I haven't a clue where I could have put them. I looked all over the place and I could only find two cutters - both of which were purchased in December but were not used. lol. So I wandered over to Meijer the other day and grabbed a couple of cookie cutters - they were on sale for $.50 each, so yay! - and brought them home to manipulate some new mustache cookie cutters.



It worked out better this way I think, because while I liked the look of the first mustache cookie cutter better, it was a smaller, flimsier design, and made a lot of easily broken mustaches.






Soooo I thought, since I did take a few pics of the process, I figured I'd share the recipe for the cookies as well!

 It's from Betty Crocker's Cookie Book. Some research shows this particular edition is from 1984, but there have been many editions before and after this particular cookie book. This one is ours though. It's beautiful. It's worn and full of random ingredient splatters and some cut out words, (I was once too young to know cutting up a book for homework is not usually acceptable) and, tucked in to the beginning and end of the book, are pages of hand written and printed recipes that we use. We don't have a normal recipe book - we just stick all the recipes in this cookie book.

This is the recipe I use for sugar cookies. There's an actual recipe for sugar cookies on the page prior to this one, but this recipe is slightly different, and I love them. The directions call for frosting, and say you're supposed to cut star shapes and turn them in to frosting sandwich cookies, but I don't do that. That's never sounded appealing to me. Here's the recipe written out:

Snowflake Cookies (Sugar cookies)

• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup shortening (part margarine or butter - softened)
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract*
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 container vanilla ready-to-spread frosting*
• powdered sugar**

* ingredients I don't use are in italics
** powdered sugar is not in original recipe, it's what I use

Book instructions
Mix sugar, shortening, eggs, and vanilla. Stir in flour, baking powder and salt. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Heat oven to 400°F. Roll dough 1/8 inch thick on lightly cloth-covered board. Cut in to 2 1/2 - inch star shapes. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until light brown, 6 to 8 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet; cool. Put cookies together in pairs with about 1/4 teaspoon frosting (do not match points of stars). Heat remaining frosting over low heat until thin. Tint with food color if desired. Pour about 1 teaspoon frosting over each pair of stars. ABOUT 2 DOZEN


noxy instructions
Mix all ingredients. Cover and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Heat oven to 400F. Roll dough out in between two sheets of flour-covered plastic wrap until you think it's thin enough. Use various cookie cutters to cut dough. Place on a cookie sheet that has a sheet of aluminum foil on it. Bake until edges begin to brown, 6-12 minutes. Remove aluminum from cookie sheet, allow to cool.

Add a large amount of powdered sugar to a small amount of water. Color with food coloring or cocoa as desired. Use a butter knife to slather powdered sugar frosting over cookies. Leave some unfrosted. Add sprinkles if needed.


...

Here's the dough all mixed and covered - ready for the fridge

 The next day I got the dough out and readied the counter. It's a lot easier for me to roll dough out in between two sheet of plastic wrap, with flour sprinkled on top. Then I don't have to worry about the dough sticking to anything.

 The thickness always varies with me, because I'm no good at judging when it's thin enough.

 There are my manipulated cookie cutters. The bigger one used to be an "N" and the smaller one used to be an "X".

I split the dough in to thirds, the first third was for the small staches, the next for the larger one, and the last third was a mixture of staches and dinosaurs. (I wasn't giving all the cookies away. I wanted dinosaurs.)

 Therse are the large ones sitting on a sheet of foil on top of the cookie sheet. I usually use either foil or wax paper for this bit, just makes things easier. I can lift the entire sheet off - cookies and all - and not have to worry about removing them one by one with a spatula or whatever. Just peel 'em off the sheets.

Those are the small staches cooking in the oven.

 And there are two thirds, all baked and ready for the next step.

Tada! All the cookies, ready to go. Some up in the left corner were broken, but otherwise they fared well.  I didn't all of them, I wanted to leave some plain.

I ended up sending 18 cookies away for the baby shower, so we have a few leftover. They're quite yummy, though I think I prefer them plain. I enjoy the dinosaurs.  :)