Hey! Welcome to my first blog post………
I’ve been doing quite a few tutorials for the online Cake Minds magazine recently, so I thought it would be fun to share them with you here, in case you haven’t had a chance to read them in the magazine.
I’ve been making cookies for a while now, and have tried lots of recipes – I wanted a crisp cookie, that tasted really buttery and of vanilla, but didn’t spread in the oven! Having a no spread cookie is crucial when making cookies! I’ve included my recipe below.
Vanilla cookies
Ingredients
- 450 g plain flour
- 230 g block butter at room temperature
- 200 g caster sugar
- 1 egg
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Cream butter and sugar together in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment until pale and fluffy. Gradually add the egg and vanilla. Add the flour in 2 batches with your mixer on low, scraping down the bowl between batches. The dough should come together to form a ball of cookie dough. This will make around 14-15 large cookies.
- Cut 4 large pieces of baking paper. Split the dough into 2 large balls on top of 2 of the pieces of baking paper. Place the other pieces of baking paper on top. Use a rolling pin (I use a Joseph Joseph one with spacers to get an even thickness of dough), to roll out your dough between the 2 pieces of baking paper. Please your dough on a tray and place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
- Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C.
- Remove the dough from the fridge and cut out your cookies. Place your cut cookies onto baking paper on a baking tray and put back into the fridge for 30 mins.
- Remove from the fridge and immediately place in your pre-heated oven for 12-15 mins.
I’ve decorated cookies with royal icing and fondant icing – I am still perfecting my techniques for using royal icing to decorate my cookies – I find getting the right consistency quite tricky. I’ve been using fondant/sugar paste for making cupcake toppers for years (its where I first started my cake decorating journey), so I am much more at home with using fondant/sugarpaste rather than royal icing. So for our nurse cookies we will be decorating with sugar paste.
There are a whole host of cookie cutters, stamps and embossers out there – but you don’t need to spend a fortune on cookie cutters – sometimes you can adapt ones you already have and turn them into a shape that will work for your theme.
I used the following cutters to make my nurse appreciation cookies: heart, nurses face and syringe are all by Sweetsugarbelle (https://www.sweetsugarbelle.com). The rectangle cutter is by Cookies by Courtney (https://cookiesbycourtney.co.uk) and the t-shirt cutter is by Ann Clark (https://www.annclarkcookiecutters.com). I also used an embossing stamp by Cookiekut (https://cookiekut.com) to make the ‘Thank you NHS’ ones.
Nurses faces – step by step
Using the nurse face cookie cutter, cut a flesh coloured base. Use this to build onto for the hat, hair etc as shown. I used a square cutter to make the mask and cut it into three, and then using a stitching tool along the edge, and then overlapped the three pieces. I used a stiff consistency royal icing to pipe the ties for the mask and outline the hat. I then used edible ink pens to draw on the eyes and Red Cross on the hat. Finally I used edible pink food dust to give her rosy cheeks!
