Homemade Frosted Animal Cookies

Our dad loves frosted animal cookies. The other day I came across a recipe to make jumbo frosted animal cookies. And then my dad told me he had a business trip in a nearby city and asked to visit for the weekend (of course!). I was planning dinners for the weekend and wanted a treat--that's when I realized the stars aligned for me to make homemade frosted animal cookies for my dad.

Homemade Frosted Animal Cookies
(Recipe adapted from Munchkin Munchies)


Ingredients:
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
16 oz. buttercream icing (storebought)
red food coloring
rainbow sprinkles

Directions:

Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg.

Using an electric mixer, beat the butter on high speed for 2 minutes. Reduce the speed to medium, and slowly add the sugar. Beat for 2 minutes, stopping periodically to scrape the sides of the bowl. Add egg and vanilla and beat for 1 minute, stopping the mixer once to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Stop the mixer and add half of the flour mixture. Beat on low speed until most of the flour has been absorbed. Add the remaining flour and beat until all of the flour has been absorbed and the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl, 2 to 3 minutes.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface. Shape dough into a disk shape and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or up to 2 days.

Once your dough is chilled, preheat an oven to 350°F.

Let the dough stand at room temperature for 5 minutes.  Roll out the dough to almost 1/2-inch thick on a lightly floured surface. Cut out shapes with cookie cutters and move them to baking sheets.

Bake the cookies until very light golden brown, about 15 minutes. Transfer the baking sheets to wire racks to cool for about 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to wire racks to cool completely.



Frosting:
Place the buttercream icing in a microwave-safe bowl from 15-30 seconds (until pourable). If it becomes too thin, add some powdered sugar. Divide icing into 2 bowls. Tint half of it pink and keep the other half white. With the cookies on a wire rack, place the rack over a baking sheet (or over wax paper).  Use a spoon to cover each cookie with the icing. Sprinkle with the rainbow sprinkles.



Makes about 16 cookies.

Adding Privacy to Front Door Sidelights

Note: Please forgive the horrible pictures in this post it is really hard to take a picture of windows. 

Our front door has sidelights on the two sides and across the top. This adds a lot of light but also leaves a lot of windows for little neighborhood children eyes to peek in. Can you see them now with their hands cupped around the sides of their eyes peeking in the windows?

Ahhh! I spelled SiDelights wrong! Sorry you'll have to forgive me!

I saw this pin and thought it was a great solution. She gets her tutorial from this post. (original tutorial)

Both posts are great! Here are some additional tips that I found while I was doing this tutorial:

• After cutting out the shapes they will curl up. I put mine inside of a big book to help flatten them.
• Use small scissors.
• These shapes are a tessellation. They will fit together as you cut. The pattern found in the original tutorial is not quite perfect. To get your shapes to fit together a little better, before you start, make sure the top and bottom are the same. I wish I had done this.
• It's not going to be perfect. If you look close at any of the pictures you can tell the area in between is not uniform. You and I are the only ones that will look that close.
• When peeling the backing off the paper bend the shape curved with the paper on the inside of the curve (see picture) to help from creasing the contact paper while peeling. 
• Enlist some help because seriously cutting 76 of these bad boys was time consuming! 
• I cut a strip of paper 1/2" wide to help with spacing after a while I just eyeballed it. 

I kept mine the original size of the pattern unlike one of the tutorials. 

What do you think? 

Election Day Cookies

Happy Election Day everyone! Please go out and vote! Here are some yummy cookies to entice you to do it:

Cookies from a mix. Frosting from the Better Homes and Gardens.  (Any tips on getting RED and BLUE frosting with food coloring?)

Short and sweet from me today so don't waste any time---VOTE!

Fondant Cake

Fondant is like play dough but it's edible and for cake. It's frosting! Ok it doesn't taste all that great but it's fun to cake decorate with. In our church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) we have an organization just for adult women called Relief Society. It was founded in March of 1842. So in March we had a birthday party for the Relief Society in our local congregations. We had some really good speakers and lots and lots of cake. And of course I volunteered to make a cake because I'm crazy.

Ok now for the cake. I bought some already made fondant at Wal-Mart. It was pretty inexpensive and a time saver. Plus it was dyed as well. First make the cakes (no brainer right?) Now this is called dirty frosting. Just frost the cake. No need to do it nicely, this is what will hold the fondant to the cake.

Roll out the fondant evenly and not too thin. It should be about 1/4" or less but make sure you roll the fondant out the same every time. Once you've rolled it out, you can put the whole thing on the the cake by transferring it with a rolling pin. I did checkers so I used a small tupperware container and cut out rectangles. I then cut the rectangles in half. Cookie cutters come in handy here but I don't have any at school hence the tupperware.

After cutting out all the squares, start in the middle of the cake and lay out the fondant pieces. Continue covering the whole cake.

When you get to the edges, cut off the excess before you apply the pieces to the cake. Since this was a round cake I held the piece up to the spot where it was supposed to go and kind of eyed how much I should cut off.

I left some pieces rectangular for the side of the cake. I had to cut off a little bit to be the right height but all worked out well. The pattern didn't go all the way around so that became the back of the cake!

Next I made an R and an S out of the extra fondant I had and stuck those on top with a little bit of water. When attaching fondant to fondant, water is an excellent glue.

Use a sharper knife to get through the fondant when cutting the cake. And now it's all ready to eat.
(If you want to make fondant Click Here to see the last time I made it!)

Frosting Christmas Cookies and Drizzle Frosting Recipe

One of my favorite Christmas traditions as a child, and even now, is decorating Christmas cookies. It is the culmination of the season for our family, since we make and decorate them on Christmas Eve.

My mom makes the dough and the kids roll it out and cut the cookies. We make at least four cookie sheets worth!

I have to share a secret with you: We make UGLY cookies. And we love them. This is why it's so fun and why we're still decorating them even as adults.

 We use a drizzled kind of frosting, so the cookies are tasty but....not perfect in appearance. I think we've made some really cool cookies though.

Harry Potter cookies to go along with our obsession. These are Jasmine's. She made that golden snitch cookie that says "I open at the close" cool, huh? Don't forget about Harry, Ron, Hermione and Voldemorte

She made the Weasley family too!

Now for some not so pretty cookies:

Michael Jackson, RIP!

Jaime by Jaime (I added an elephant for some class)

My favorite on here is by my brother-in-law, he did the NC State cookie. I was impressed!

Frosting Recipe:

Ingredients:

1 lb Powdered Sugar
6 Tablespoons of Whole milk
6 Tablespoons of light corn syrup
1 Teaspoon of almond or vanilla extract

Directions:
With a whisk, combine sugar and milk until smooth. Then mix in corn syrup and extract. We put about 3/4 cup into a mug and then add food coloring and stir. We use spoons to drizzle the frosting on and tooth picks for accents.

Do you make Christmas cookies every year? Ever made ugly ones?