Happy Easter! {Carrot sugar cookies}

Well the Easter long weekend is coming to an end, we've survived the sugar high and chocolate meltdowns.

We've endured a breakout of nits and an entire weekend of Miss 3 waking up screaming all night long. 

We've celebrated with our families and our friends (all the while NOT passing on headlice thank goodness).

It's been a lovely weekend. 

I have a very strong opinion on the use of non-certified Palm oil and as a main ingredient in so many Easter Eggs and Easter chocolate we decided not to buy any this year. 

(The Easter Bunny did drop of a Cadbury Freddo Frog Casket to each of our children. Palm oil free of course.) 

So what do you make instead? 

What will the kids love? Something sweet  and something cute - that's what!! 

What does the Easter bunny sustain himself with whilst delivering all of those Easter goodies? 
Carrots?! Did you say Carrots?!

                                  

{Sugar Cookie Dough : Montreal Confections} 

Ingredients
4 Cups of Regular Granulated Sugar
1 Pound of Butter (454 grams) 
2 Tablespoons Vanilla 
4 Eggs
1 Teaspoon Baking Powder
7 Cups All Purpose flour 


Method
In your mixer cream butter and sugar together. 
Add Eggs one at a time until combined.
Add Vanilla.
In a large bowl measure and sift the flour and baking powder. 
Slowly add the flour mixture into the wet ingredients until a dough forms.

Split dough into two, shape into discs and wrap and refrigerate the dough for half an hour.

Flour your bench and rolling pin.
Roll out dough to 0.5 cm thickness and using a floured cutter cut out your shapes. 
Place the shapes on a baking sheet lined with baking paper and freeze for a half an hour. 
Bake straight from the freezer for 10- 15 minutes depending on your oven. 

{As you can see this recipe makes a lot, you can halve the recipe. It was way too big for my mixer and I made a huge mess}.

{Tips to remember: Use butter at room temperature, use a bench mixer with a large bowl or a large bowl with a hand mixer. This mixture make A LOT of cookies. I'm not kidding. You can freeze the cookies unbaked for a few weeks. Your Dough may be slightly sticky but you are using flour to roll out and the dough will absorb some of the flour.}

{Cutting out the Carrot Shapes.}

{Spacing the shapes out as they will spread a little when baking}

{Royal Icing}  

Ingredients
8 Tablespoons of water
3 Tablespoons of Meringue Power (I used Pavlova Magic, Yes the one in the cute plastic Egg) 
Icing sugar
Lemon juice.

Method
In a large bowl add your water and meringue powder. Using a whisk mix these together until they a frothy. Add Icing Sugar, whisking until you have a thick paste. There is no measured amount, just keep adding until its thick and glossy.

Separate some of your mixture into 2 bowls add Orange gel paste to one and Green Gel paste into the other. You will need to make the icing into 15 second consistency. To do this you will need to add lemon juice drop by drop mixing until you have a smooth consistency that when you run a spoon through it settles back into a flat top after you've counted to 15 seconds.
I hope that makes sense. I will post a link to a youtube video that I like that gives a great tutorial on 15 second Royal icing here.
One you have gotten your colour and consistency right you are ready to use it on cooled cookies. I use disposable piping bags with a coupler and a number 2 tip for this project.

{If you look closely you will see I've use elastic bands to close the bags and sticky tape over the tip.}

On your cookie pipe a border in orange and flood immediately, using a toothpick you can help spread the icing and smooth it out.

{You can see I've outlined and flooded the cookie, at this point I used a toothpick to spread the icing.}

 Gently shake your cookie to get a smooth result.

{Keep the bottom of the cookie touching your work surface and gently and
quickly shake the cookie to smooth out the surface.}

 Let this crust for 20 minutes, you will see that the icing has crusted because it will lose some of it's sheen. You will need to let it crust before moving on to the green because you do not want the colours to run into one another. 
Using the same technique pipe a border and flood with the green icing. You will need to wait 12-24 hours before packaging and the cookies will set best if left out uncovered in the open air.

{I made so many of these little suckers. They tasted really good too!} 

This was my first time icing cookies like this. 
The recipe I used was from Montreal Confections, I absolutely love her YouTube channel and blog and I was inspired to try something simple like these carrots and really learnt the basics of how to do it from watching the videos. 
It was alot of fun, but it was time consuming and I still have alot of frozen shapes cut out waiting to be baked another day. Next time I do something like this I will do it using my Greek Yoghurt Sugar Cookie Recipe that you can find here. It tastes a lot nicer and even though the lemon juice helps cuts the sweetness of the icing I think that it would really help to use a less sweet dough recipe.

I hope that I have kind of simplified things for you so you can achieve a great looking decorated sugar cookie. It's not something that I see often in Australia but I bet they would look effective on a Party table and I will be looking for excuses to make them again and again for all occasions. 
So do have a go and send me pictures of your results I would love to see them. 
You can email me at staceytimms@gmail.com.

Until next time....
Stacey xx 

Homemade Sandwich Cookies {Jammie Dodgers}

Well here we go, my first blog post and I've been making "Jammie Dodgers" my way.
I used a sugar cookie recipe I came by a while back that uses Greek Yoghurt and since I buy Greek yoghurt by the bucket (I'm not kidding, I literally buy buckets full of yoghurt), I thought why not? 
Let's give it a whirl.

Strawberry Frosting filled "Jammie Dodger"
or the correct term "Sandwich Cookie"

Now if you want to try out this recipe you'll need to set aside a good chunk of your day, It's 30+ degrees Celsius here in Perth, Western Australia and alas I do not have an air-conditioned kitchen. 
So I had to keep putting the dough back into the fridge to harden up, after rolling and cutting I would have to chill again and It's taken me since around 11 am (with a quick trip to the airport thrown in for good measure). It's 4 pm now and I've pulled out he last 2 trays of cookies, cooling ready to fill. 

I cheated today which is pretty bad considering it's my first post, but in my defense I've had a child home from school sick and a pile of washing to get through so Hubby had clean clothes to take back to work today. I decided to use bought frosting to fill my cookies.

So I am going to share this recipe with you and I don't know where I got it from, I've had it for ages and I've made some modifications but want you to know {THE ORIGINAL RECIPE IS NOT MINE}. 

Without further rambling here is the {BEST EVER!!! Sugar Cookie Recipe} 

{Ingredients}
3 & 3/4 Cups of All-Purpose flour
1 & 1/2 Caster Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp Bicarb Soda
1 Egg
250g Butter softened
1/2 cup Greek Yoghurt (whole fat please)

{Filling}
I used Betty Crocker Strawberry Frosting

{Method}
Preheat Oven to 180 degrees Celsius

In your Mixer cream softened butter and sugar together, add Egg, vanilla and Yoghurt. Mix through until combined.
In a large bowl add your flour, salt and Bicarb and use a whisk to aerate the mix (you could sift it but ain't nobody got time for that!) 
With the mixer on low slowly add your dry ingredients, when it's all in there mix well until combined and smooth.

At this point you will need to split your mixture into 2 and shape into flat discs wrap in Clingwrap and refrigerate for half and hour or until nice and firm.
Roll out between 2 pieces of Baking Paper to 2mm thick and using a 1.7/8 inch crinkle cutter cut out your cookies. 
Line them up on the baking sheet so there will be 2 rounds for each biscuit and then punch a hole in every second biscuit with your 1 cm heart cutter.
Place your cookie sheet into the fridge for 10 minutes to chill the shapes so they will keep shape whilst baking and get to work on the next lot of cutting. 
At this point you may need to chill your dough again before rolling out and cutting again.
Once your cut out circles have chilled, Pop into the oven and set your timer for 12 minutes.
Take them out and cool for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Crinkle edged rounds look pretty

I always use 2 pieces of baking paper to roll out the dough.

Once you have all of you lovely baked biscuits sandwich 2 together making sure one has the lovely cut out heart shape, with around a teaspoon of the frosting (that you totally bought from the grocery store). 
Continue until you have a lovely mountain of sandwich cookies.

All ready for some afternoon tea. 

I had lots of fun making these and I hope that someone out there sees this and thinks that they might have a go at making them too. Now if you'll excuse me I have to find some deserving people to share these with so I don't eat them all by myself. 

Coffee, biscuit and relaxation perfect way to end the day.

Until next time.... Stacey XX