Sugar cookies

I had a wonderful time celebrating my Christmas and new year with family and friends in the west coast! It was a ten day trip and hence I had to leave my blog inactive for a while.I absolutely loved the beautiful pacific coast line, the wonderful isolated beaches every where and the snow covered mountains surrounding lake Tahoe. We managed to squeeze in a couple of wine tasting tours in Napa valley as well. The rest of the time was well spent with our friends and relatives in Sacramento and San Fransisco 🙂 This is what I would call a perfect holiday:) I cant help myself from sharing few pics from our trip!

I have forced myself to stop with these pictures 🙂 We got a new SLR camera recently and I couldn’t resist myself from clicking pictures every five minutes 🙂 So coming to the subject matter of this blog post – sugar cookies.

As I said in one of earlier blog posts, I had decided to bake some cookies for my 8 and 13 year old cousins, with whom I spent Christmas this year! Deciding to incorporate some Christmas cheer in the cookies I baked, I wanted to make snow flake/star and snow man shaped cookies.Cookie cutter, few basic staples, food colors and lots of Christmas enthusiasm I was ready to bake these lovely cookies. I was very happy that everyone loved it!!

Ingredients:

For the cookies:

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 large egg at room temperature
• 2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder

For the icing:

• 1 box confectioners sugar
• 5 tbsp meringue powder

Method:

For the cookies:

Beat butter until creamy and smooth. Add sugar to it and beat until light and fluffy.

Add the egg, vanilla extract and beat until fully combined.

In a bowl, add the flour and baking powder. Mix well until well combined.

Add some flour to the sugar and egg mixture and mix in low speed. Keep adding flour in batches and mix until it forms a dough.

Divide the dough into two portions and roll the dough using a rolling pin.Let the rolled dough be of equal thickness (about 1/4th” thickness)

Chill the dough for a couple of hours (chilling is mandatory) Alternatively you can chill the dough and then roll it. But I felt the dough might be difficult to roll when chilled, so rolled it first instead.

After the rolled dough has chilled, cut the dough into desired shapes. I used a star shaped cookie cutter and made some snow man cookies myself.

Pre-heat oven to 350 C. Line the baking tray with parchment paper and place the cut cookie dough in the tray and bake for 10-11 minutes until they start coloring at the edges.

When done, remove the cookies and cool them completely before you ice the cookies.

For the icing:

Combine sugar, meringue powder and 1/2 cup water in a bowl and mix in a low speed until it forms a paste. (You can substitute meringue powder with raw egg whites. I haven’t tried it using egg whites though)

If you want the icing to be thin add more water. ( Add few drops of water, check the consistency and add more if needed.)

If the water is more and you want to make it thick, add more sugar.

Decorate:

Add the colors to the icing.(gel colors are preferred)

Use the icing with the thicker consistency as a border on the cookie and the one with thinner consistency to fill the gap.

Let the cookies dry completely before storing them in a air tight container.

If you want to use just sprinkles or colored sugar to decorate the cookies, add them to the cut cookie dough and bake them along with the sprinkles