ABC Gingerbread Men

I'm not sure when these cookie cutters hit the markets, but I know they were pretty popular last year. I knew I wanted a set of my very own for this Christmas, so I ordered them from Amazon a couple of weeks ago so that I too could make the slightly disturbing, but very cute gingerbread men. Maybe I should have made my gingerbread men with smiles instead of frowns, but I kept thinking that they would be even more disturbing looking if they were happy about being eaten... or maybe I'm giving the gingerbread men far too much credit for emotions...

I even managed to keep the scope of this project under control since I frequently get in over my head once I start making and decorating cookie cutouts. This time I only made one batch of gingerbread cookie dough (from my KAF Cookies Book) and only one color of frosting -- just to keep things easier.

The cookies are quite good, the frosting came from my Cookie Craft book (the book to buy if you want to learn how to decorate cookies with royal icing) and together they work wonderfully together. Oh... and the title ABC Gingerbread Men is the name of the cookie cutters: Already Been Chewed.


Ingredients:
3/4 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup molasses
1 tsp salt
2 tsps cinnamon
2 tsps ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 large egg
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

In a saucepan set over low heat, or in the microwave, melt the butter, then stir in the sugar, molasses, salt and spices. Transfer the mixture to a medium sized mixing bowl, let it cool to lukewarm, then beat in the egg.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and baking soda, then stir these into the wet ingredients. Divide the dough in half and wrap well. Refrigerate for 1 hour or longer.

Preheat oven to 375. Remove the dough from the fridge and roll it out to the desired thickness -- thicker dough = softer cookies. Sprinkle flour on the surface of the counter and the dough and rotate it often to prevent sticking. Cut the cookies with the cutout, and transfer to a baking sheet.

Bake 8-10 minutes -- depending on the size of the cookies, until the edges are set.

Remove from the oven and cool completely before decorating.

Frosting:

For Piping:
2 cups (1 lb) powdered sugar
1 tsp powdered egg whites
3 tablespoons warm water
1 tablespoon lemon juice or 1-2 tsps extract

Put all the ingredients in the mixer and blend on medium high for 5 minutes. Put the frosting into airtight containers immediately or it will dry out.

Halloween Sugar Cookies

Once again my love affair with cookie cutters has proven to be far superior to my ability to actually decorate cookies. I did however discover an awesome version of sugar cookies perfect for cutouts. I used the base recipe in the Cookie Craft book and substituted half a cup of maple sugar for a half a cup of the granulated sugar and used 1/2 tsp of maple extract creating a lovely maple cookie with a little bit of nubby texture from the maple sugar.

I was very ambitious with this whole project, baking dozens of cookies and using 6 different frosting colors in flood and piping variations. I quickly discovered though that the colors did not hold very true for the flood frostings, despite having the color mixed in while they were still in the mixer. So the red was a bit runny and faded looking here and there, and the black was downright pathetic, which was fine because my piping skills are pretty pathetic too. The poor piping skills combined with my lack of artistic ability (I seriously have issues drawing stick figures...) made for some rather... uh... interesting cookies.

Luckily, we still had some black fondant leftover from one of our cakes and Chris made some awesome looking silhouettes. The sad thing was that the silhouettes were really easy -- roll the fondant out thin, cut the fondant with a cookie cutter, brush a little water on the fondant and stick it on the cookie -- and they were gorgeous, especially compared to the royal icing versions.

Chris' fondant bat next to my rather confused looking royal icing bat:





Two devils, neither very good, but still better than than the female sex-doll version I managed to create...




Not quite sure how I ended up with an orange asian dude in a hat... it started out a frankenstein head, but I didn't make green frosting:



A trio of owls:




Chris' fondant cat:




The recipe for the maple cookies:
Ingredients:
3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter softened
1/2 cup maple sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar (or 1 cup granulated if you don't have maple sugar)
1 large egg
1/2 tsp maple extract (or 2 tsps vanilla extract)


Whisk together the flour and salt and set aside.

In the bowl of a mixer, cream the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and the extract and blend well. Add the flour and mix until it disappears.

Divide the dough in two and roll each piece out between two pieces of wax paper to 1/8 inch thick. Transfer the flat dough to the fridge and chill for at least 30 minutes.

Once the dough is chilled, cut your cookie shapes and bake at 350 -- the size of the cookies will determine the baking time, but somewhere between 8-12 minutes.

Once the cookies are cool you can decorate any way you want. :)

For the royal icing recipes check out this post.

Autumn Sugar Cookies

I saw some pictures of decorated sugar cookies on Tastespotting the other day and I had to check them out. Bakerella claimed that she was inexperienced and intimidated by decorated sugar cookies which certainly struck a cord with me because despite my love affair with cookie cutters, my attempts at decorating the cookies have been rather pathetic at best. However, Bakerella's cookies were absolutely gorgeous and she attributed her success to the book Cookie Craft. I picked the book up the next day and set out on my own adventures in decorated sugar cookies.

Things I learned:

1. it's a very time consuming process and requires at least 2 days or you could go crazy or kill your back or both

2. decorating the cookies is the fun, fast and easy part. prep and cleanup isn't nearly so fun, fast, or easy.

3. you have to make the flood frosting the same day you plan to decorate

4. dye the flood frosting before putting it into the squeeze bottles

5. I will never get the shade I'm aiming for with the dye

6. the color of the frosting darkens considerably once it dries

7. using a number 1 tip to pipe the outline is annoying and painful, but the line practically disappears. Using a number 2 tip is probably best, but a number 3 will do as long as you don't mind the outline being visible.

I still need to practice with the whole process, but the book really did explain everything and made the whole process doable. Plus, these are the most attractive cookies I've made to date and they taste good too. I didn't use the cookie recipe in the book, I used the sugar cookie recipe from Carole Walters' Cookie Book which I've made before and liked quite a bit. It also has the distinct advantage of being mixed in the food processor which really makes the process quick and easy.

I did use the frosting recipe the book gave (below) and I followed their instructions pretty closely which is probably why I was as successful as I was. With their explanations and the illustrations in the book the whole thing was pretty easy. In fact, the hardest and most frustrating part was dying the frosting. The keys are:

1. have all the equipment on hand -- I had to buy a few more piping tips and squeeze bottles,

2. plan the whole process out so that you have time to bake and cool cookies, make and dye frosting, and decorate the cookies being sure to allow several hours of drying time for the flooded cookies.

Next up: Halloween cookies. :)




Frosting:

For Piping:
4 cups (1 lb) powdered sugar
2 tsp powdered egg whites
6 tablespoons warm water
1 tablespoon lemon juice or 1-2 tsps extract

Put all the ingredients in the mixer and blend on medium high for 5 minutes. Put the frosting into airtight containers immediately or it will dry out.

For Flooding:
4 cups (1 lb) powdered sugar
2 teaspoons powdered egg whites
12 tablespoons warm water
2 tablespoons lemon juice or 1-2 tsps extract.

Put all the ingredients in the mixer and blend on medium high speed for 5 minutes. Cover immediately.

Easter Sugar Cookies

One of my many wonderful Christmas presents this year was a set of Easter Cookie Cutters. I actually really suck at decorating cookies, but I get weirdly excited and happy by the prospect of sitting down with sugar cookies, frosting, sprinkles and pastry bags. I chalk it up to being my mother's daughter since many of my memories as a kid involve her making some elaborate, fancy, beautiful decorated cake for some occasion or another. I keep telling myself that I will never get better if I don't practice and that I'm sure my mother had to start somewhere too... but my cookies always look put together by a 5-year-old, as opposed to a well-planned and perfectly executed decorated treat.

*shrug* practice makes perfect...




The good news is that my cookies taste really good. :) I got yet another new baking book -- Great Cookies by Carole Waters -- and gave her sugar cookie cutout recipe a try. Actually, she had a couple of recipes in the book, and I tried the one titled "neil's scalloped sugar cookies." The dough went together quickly and easily in the food processor. It was easy to work with after chilling in the fridge for an hour, and the cookies were soft and only slightly sweet the way a good cutout cookie should be. I considered using her glaze/frosting recipe, but in the end my love affair with the melted butter/powdered sugar/milk glaze won out so I went with that. I've been burned by nasty powdered sugar glazes too often in the past....

The instructions call for decorating these with sanding sugar before baking, I just skipped that step and made my favorite powdered sugar glaze (2 cups powdered sugar, 2 tbsps melted butter, 1 tsp vanilla extract, enough milk to get the consistency I wanted) for decorating the cookies after they cooled.



Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour, spooned in and leveled
3/4 cup strained confectioner's sugar, spooned in and leveled
2/3 cup (1 1/3 sticks) cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
3 large egg yolks
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 large egg white, lightly beaten with 2 tsps of water
Pearl sugar or sparkling white sugar for sprinkling

Make the dough: Place the flour, confectioners' sugar, and butter in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pulse four or five times to combine, then process for 10 seconds, or until the mixture is the texture of fine meal.

Combine the yolks and vanilla and with the food processor off, add to the work bowl. Pulse two or three times then process for 8 to 10 seconds, or just until a mass forms. Empty the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. With lightly floured hands shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 1 hour or up to 3 days.

Bake the cookies: Preheat oven to 350. Lightly butter cookie sheets.

Working with one fourth of the dough at a time, roll on a floured surface until 3/16 inch thick. Using cookie cutter, but into the desired shapes. Transfer the cookies to a sheet of waxed paper and brush with egg whites and sprinkle with sugar.

Place on cookies sheets and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the edges are just golden brown.

Decorated Christmas Cookies

I wanted to make really cool looking decorated cookies that looked and tasted great. Unfortunately, I'm not all that artistic... that and as far as I can tell it's impossible to make frosting that tastes good and is good for decorations. For the sugar cookies I made for Halloween, and the sugar cookies I made earlier this week, I used buttercream -- never one of my favorites, but I at least have experience piping it and decorating with it (my mom did cakes -- lots, and lots of very cool looking cakes when I was kid.) Her buttercream-decorated creations always looked pretty good though... mine looked a bit gimpy:


Well, I'm sure her stuff looked a little funny when she was first starting too... that's what I keep telling myself anyway. The sugar cookies actually tasted pretty good, but then again, I'm a big fan of sugar cookies. The frosting was too sweet like most buttercreams, and it never actually set-up which meant it got goopy at room temperature, but if you liked buttercream I'm sure it was fine. I actually used a Pastry Queen recipe for the frosting which involved heating egg whites and using granulated sugar, rather than powdered sugar. The cookies were the Dorie Greenspan sugar cookies recipe and they were easy to work with and tasted good to boot.


The gingerbread, on the other hand, was a Baking Bites recipe, the gingerbread recipe she swears by. I thought about using the Pastry Queen recipe, but hers is specifically for tree ornaments and not necessarily for eating (although knowing the Pastry Queen, they probably tasted great.) Part of my problem with gingerbread is I just don't like it all that much. When I have a cookie, I want it to be sweet, and gingerbread men just aren't that sweet. Granted, they're supposed to get a lot of the sweetness from the frosting, but again, I don't like frosting that much.


For the gingerbread though, I tried Royal Icing, which is a more traditional cookie icing and has the advantage of actually setting up which means you can stack the cookies to transport them. The disadvantages are flavor and ease of use. I made two versions to use on the cookies and I didn't really like either one. One version used lemon juice with powdered sugar and egg whites, while the other used powdered sugar, vanilla, milk and powdered egg whites. Both of them tasted like powdered sugar -- not one of my favorite flavors.


Besides tasting a bit off to me, the frosting was also a bit of a pain in the ass since it was runny. I went ahead and put it in a piping bag with a round tip, but it dripped all over the place if you weren't careful. I suppose I could have thickened it a bit more by adding more powdered sugar... but that would have made the flavor even worse. Again, if you like gingerbread and you like cookie icing, I'm sure these would taste great to you -- they're just not my favorite things.

Since there are several recipes involved, and I wasn't a huge fan of any of them (plus I have other posts to do tonight) I'm not going to post any recipes right now. If anybody wants the recipes I used --feel free to ask and I will post them ASAP. :)

Recipes for the cookies

I used a sugar cookie recipe that I found on the foodtv site courtesy of Nigella Lawson. The dough was easy to work with and produced a soft cookie with a good flavor. I did roll the dough out in a mixture of powdered sugar and flour, but that's the only change I made to the cookie recipe. I prefer a soft cookie so I checked the cookies after 8 minutes and usually pulled them out of the oven after 10.

Cookies:

6 tablespoons soft unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and moving towards moussiness, then beat in the egg and vanilla. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter and eggs, and mix gently but surely. If you think the finished mixture is too sticky to be rolled out, add more flour, but do so sparingly as too much will make the dough tough. Form into a fat disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and let rest in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

Sprinkle a suitable surface with flour, place disk of dough on it, and sprinkle a little more flour on top of that. Then roll it out to a thickness of about 1/4-inch. Cut into shapes, dipping the cutter into flour as you go, and place the cookies a little apart on 2 parchment or silpat lined baking sheets.

Bake for 8 to 12 minutes; obviously it depends on the shape you're using and whether they are on the upper or lower shelf, though you can swap them around after about 5 minutes. When they're ready expect them to be tinged a pronounced gold around the edges; they'll be softish still in the middle, but set while they cool.


The frosting was more challenging since I don't like powdered sugar glazes (the standard for decorated sugar cookies) and I don't like most butter cream frostings either. I finally found a recipe from epicurious for a mocha chocolate butter cream that I modified a bit. Here is the recipe as I made it:

Frosting:

6 ounces good semisweet or white chocolate
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temp
1 large egg yolk at room temp
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar

Chop the chocolate and place it in a heat-proof bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Stir until just melted and set aside until cooled to room temperature. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium-high speed until light yellow and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the egg yolk and vanilla and continue beating for 3 minutes. Turn the mixer to low, gradually add the confectioners' sugar, then beat at medium speed, scraping down the bowl as necessary, until smooth

I used white chocolate to make the frosting for the cookies which produced a sweet frosting that didn't taste like powdered sugar and wasn't overpoweringly sweet. The white chocolate flavor was actually very subtle -- so don't use this recipe if you're looking for a knockout white chocolate kick. The challenge was that the frosting does not firm up at room temperature, so I would frost and decorate a layer of cookies, put them in the fridge or freezer, pull them out when the frosting was solid and stack the next layer on top. It was a bit time consuming, and of course after sitting all day at room temperature at work, the frosting softened up again.

I used the same frosting recipe for the chocolate frosting on the banana cake, but I used a 53% cocoa Nestle bar for the chocolate. The chocolate frosting was good, but still quite sweet. I think the next time I make it I will use a chocolate with a higher cocoa content which should add a nice slightly bitter cocoa counterpoint to the sweet & rich butter cream.

Frosting Thief

Two of the cookies didn't fit into the containers that I was bringing to work so Chris volunteered to finish those ones at some point. We left them on the table out of doggy nose reach, but apparently not safe from the animals. This is what Chris found when he went to get his cookies:



Chris discovered an orange and white hair on the plate with the cookies, so we think we know who the culprit was:

Halloween Cookies and Banana Cake

Chris and I were in Michaels the other day looking at the baking supplies and I got a bit excited by the cookie cutters and sprinkles. We decided to make cookies and decorate them for work, but of course the debate was what kind of cookie base (sugar or shortbread) and what kind of frosting (powdered sugar glaze, buttercream, or cream cheese.) It was pretty easy to choose sugar cookies, but the frosting was a challenge. I don't like powdered sugar glaze much because it tastes icky, buttercream is usually not that appealing to me either because of how sweet it is, and while I like cream cheese frosting, it's not really great for sugar cookies. I finally settled on buttercream frosting as the best of the lot, but instead of regular buttercream, I made a white-chocolate buttercream which was excellent. All the sweetness of normal buttercream, without the overpowering powdered sugar flavor. My decorating skills could still use some work (where's my mom when I need her?) but they taste great. The frosting will probably be all sticky, gooey tomorrow, but they should still taste good. :)





I also had some rather sorry looking bananas in the house and Chris' parents were coming for a visit so I threw together a banana cake from my Dorie Greenspan book. She offered several variations for the cake and how to serve it. I used coconut milk in the cake batter and made a chocolate buttercream frosting to decorate it. I think next time I will go for a darker chocolate in the frosting to cut some of the sweet of the buttercream, but it was still quite good.



The recipe offered other yummy sounding variations too: rum drenched, whipped cream frosting, or broken up and used as a base for sundaes... mmmm... banana cake with ice cream... drool....