Having fun baking and decorating cakes- come along for the ride.
Shortbread is a sticky subject! So, yesterday I made shortbread biscuits. The reason I made them was to test that they would work as individual biscuits. I have had some shortbread nightmares recently when trying to do one big tray/mould bake. My friend Astrid emailed me :“ I’ve been trying to perfect my shortbread technique …
Shortbread biscuits make my mouth water! I do love short bread, but I have also come to dislike it quite a lot too! (more on that in Part 2 tomorrow!) Last week Beau, Darcey and I made a load of vanilla cookies to give as Christmas gifts. One was for our brilliant postie. He’s great and …
What’s a Boobalar? I know what you’re thinking. Boobalar is what Jewish Grandmother’s call their grand kids as they hug them and squeeze their chubby cheeks. Well it is, but it’s also the name of these delicious treats. I have searched high and low and scoured Google to find out what the real/ Jewish name is …
Woman and Home’s ‘Feel Good Food magazine’ Now, you might think that I am biased about this particular magazine as not only did I work for Woman and Home for nine years, and I know the food team at Feel Good Food (or FGF as we call it!) and I also write the table setting …
The perfect Christmas cookie gift My good friend Kathryn is popping over today with gifts for the girls. She is one of my oldest friends and always buys them a gift for Christmas. She’s so generous. We always buy her a birthday present (her birthday is in January – it’s one of those funny set …
This weekend the girls are going to a Christmas party for the whole of Year One. I offered to make some cookies for the big event- this is our first Chrimbo party of the season so my first baking session (there are lots more planned!) I decided that as I need to make 40 cookies I needed to have a plan that would be really easy. In all they took in about 2 hours to make. Not bad for so many!
1 x Vanilla cookie dough (see here for recipe to make around 30 cookies)
Rolling pin
Spacing sticks
icing sugar to dust
sugarpaste in green
cookie cutter
new damp sponge / damp kitchen roll will do
Spatula / cookie lift
Roll out the dough between two spacing sticks to ensure that each cookie is exactly the same. Cut out as many trees as you can. Avoid over kneading the dough as it makes the texture tough.
The more cool the dough is, the less the cookie will spread when being baked. Load up the baking trays and pop them in the fridge for a while if the dough has become too soft.
Then bake the cookies until the edges start to brown and your whole kitchen smells like vanilla. Around 12-15 minutes. Leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
To ice the cookies, roll out a thin layer of green sugarpaste(about 3-5mm thick) Use the same tree cookie cutter to cut out each piece of sugarpaste. If the dough was cold going into the oven the cookies shouldn’t have spread too much and the green tree shaped icing will fit on top perfectly. To make sure that the icing stays put place it on a new damp sponge or dampen a piece of kitchen paper. Don’t let the sugarpaste get soggy.
Position the sugarpaste over the cookie. It may need a bit of tweaking to make it fit but it’s malleable at this stage and can be made to fit quite easily. Smooth down any icing that goes over the edge of the cookie as once it has dried it will be brittle and will break off.
Once in position smooth the sugarpaste with the palm of your hand then set aside to harden up a little. I leave them overnight.
There are so many options when it comes to what you can then do to decorate these Christmas tree cookies. I did a load of different ideas but the world is your oyster.
I made up a small amount of royal icing to make the balls and sprinkles stick. I used my new toy, the Leuke Decomax icing kit (more to come on that later) silver and pearl balls, red edible glitter and multicoloured sprinkles.
I iced lines of royal icing across the tree.
Diagonal lines worked much better than straight ones!
Then I added the sprinkles. These ones were from the supermarket and looked so much better than I expected.
The glitter worked well too but made a lot of mess! Once dry I had to dust off in between the lines of glitter with a paint brush.
Individual dots of icing were great for holding the silver balls in place. On some I made the dots of royal icing bigger, added a ball and then added sprinkles on top. These were my favorite ones!
I had to do these when my daughters weren’t around or I wouldn’t have got a look in! It is so much fun to do.
Once you have finished decorating the cookies leave them overnight to dry, then bag them up in cellophane bags with festive ribbons. They make the perfect personal Christmas gift.
I can’t wait to take these to the party on Saturday!
What are you baking for gifts this Christmas? I’d love to know.
