So, the other day I posted this:
which the astute among you might recognise as an old Tupperware box full of cookies shaped like pine trees. They are, in fact, a modified version of Neva’s Sugar Cookies, flavored with peppermint essence and run through the Mirro Cookie Press.
Before I continue, I’d like to provide y’all with what I consider an heirloom recipe. When my mom and her brother were little kids, their neighbor down the road used to bake these cookies. Mom remembered these cookies fondly, and as an adult, asked her old neighbor if she could have the recipe for them. It is as follows:
Preheat oven to 375 F.
2 C. Brown Sugar
1 C. Shortening (I use butter)
3 Eggs
1/2 C. Milk
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
5 C. Flour
Cream butter and sugar. Mix in eggs one at a time. Add milk and mix. Add soda & baking powder. Mix. Add vanilla. Add flour one cup at a time. Shape into 1″ balls and flatten with a glass dipped in white sugar. Bake 8-10 minutes.
It works best if you have a vase with a fancy cut-glass bottom to impress a fancy design in the dough.
If you add another 1/2 cup of flour, it makes the perfect consistency to go through the cookie press. If you add an extra cup of flour, instead, it makes great dough for cookie-cutter cookies. If you pursue this method, prepare to make a crap-ton of cut-out cookies. Six cups of flour is no fucking joke is what I’m saying.
Anyway, I made the little pine trees, and lo, they were pretty cute.
Then I took it upon myself to decorate them.
About a quarter of them look like this. Shitty. This is why I never do iced-and-decorated cookies. Because I am completely incompetent.
Luckily, I started getting my groove after a pan of completely messy and awful trees, and about 75% of my output ended up looking like this:
Not beautiful, but at least passable. The first batch look like I iced them with my feet.
My snowflakes, however, are inexcusable.
I had this idea that I’d be all clever and make these chocolate-orange flavored roll-out cookies, cut them into snowflake shapes, then frost them white and sprinkle sugar on it to look like ice crystals. My recipe for the Royal Icing worked perfectly for the green stuff, but for some reason the white stayed really runny. Also, the website I used for reference suggested that a very small amount of blue food color should be added to the plain white icing to make the sugar sprinkles stand out better. I obviously got too much food coloring in it, because these darn snowflakes look more like novelty bathroom tiles.
I considered calling these my “special snowflakes,” not because they included any illicit secret ingredients to make the season more merry, but special in the ‘Oh, don’t mind Cousin JoDean; she’s just a little bit special, bless her heart’ meaning of “special.”
I got a hot idea to try to make snowflake sugar cookies a few years ago, with almost equally rotten results. That time, my icing turned out lumpy, plus the sprinkles that were supposed to go on the icing wouldn’t stick. I had some super-cute sprinkles then: some extra-shiny sugar crystals and some little nonpareil things in the shape of snowflakes. My idea was a beautiful, frosty, glittery, delicate confection of loveliness, but the result was…well short of my hopes and expectations.
As you can see, they were not delicate and frosty. They were kind of lumpy and nondescript. And I should have colored the icing green for the Christmas trees. Like I did this year.
Anyway, I hope that someday I will learn my lesson and stop trying to make pretty holiday treats. Royal Icing is best left to people significantly less ham-fisted than me!
