Black and White Cookies

There are a few baked goods that have an iconic, New York status. Cheesecake is one. Another? Black and white cookies. More cake than cookie, this is one confection that brings back childhood memories for me.

Melting Snowman Cookies

There was a time in my life, where I looked forward with glee to snow days. Snow days meant sleeping late, missing school, sitting inside in my pajamas, watching bad movies and seeing the snow plows drive by. Unfortunately today I am an adult older, and huge snowfalls means canceled plans, missing work, commuting woes and other unpleasant things. In fact, I think it's safe to say, that I don't really like snow at all anymore. Except, perhaps, when it comes in uber-adorable cookie form. 

Hearts, Hearts, Hearts

Tis the season...for engagements apparently. To celebrate the impending nuptials of Deena and David, I returned once more to the cookie decorating table. One hundred cookies, six hours and three batches of royal icing later..I emerged ready to party. 

 So if you are absolutely insane enough to want to know how to do this yourself, keep on reading. Or if you just want more reasons to thank yourself for not doing this, you can also keep reading. 

Gingerbread Men

Gingerbread men are never my first choice cookie. I like the cute shape and icing decoration, but I'm just not a huge ginger fan. So why did I spent hours making the dough, cutting the cookies, baking and decorating them? Ah, a story.

Well, a certain someone - perhaps a member of my immediate family - was at the house of a friend. And since he has few social graces (see why I didn't name him?) he spotted a gingerbread cookie in their kitchen and ate it. This caused great distress to the rightful owner of said gingerbread cookie. Ever since, I have been begged to create a replacement. I finally acquiesced.

Cupcake Cookies

And the celebration continues. When Racheli had her bridal shower last week, the occasion, obviously, called for something adorable and delicious.

The cupcake cookie cutters (and ice cream cone ones) were a gift from my mom over a year ago. But I'd never really had the occasion to use them, until now.

I used my standard sugar cookie recipe, which has yet to fail me - although I did end up adding a considerable amount of flour to make it workable, so I may be changing the recipe. I worked with three colors of royal icing - pink, blue and pale green. Unfortunately the pictures aren't great, since - as usual - I work in the middle of the night.

I also somehow managed to burn a few of them, which reinvigorated the both loved and dreaded "reject pile," known for causing depression and snacking.

I experimented with the decoration used for the sprinkles on the cupcakes - a variety of sprinkles and candies. The mini m&ms were the most delicious, but didn't look as nice as some of the others. I applied each one individually, just after the icing. I did forget a couple times and to do it and then had to either leave them off, or glue them on with a little more icing.

All in all, they came out really cute, and were definitely less time consuming than writing on cookies. Success!
Next week I am on a (obviously well-deserved) vacation - but hopefully, through the magic of blogger, I'll share a couple things with you while I'm away.

If you're lucky, I'll show you what else I brought to the shower!

Tip of the Day: Though plastic spatulas are great for many things, you really need a sturdy metal spatula for cookies - both transferring them from your workspace to the cookie sheet, and then removing them after baking. Try this one for a start.

Recipe:
Cookies:
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened
1 cup plus 2 tbsps sugar
1 egg
3/4 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1/3 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt

Beat together butter and sugar until light and creamy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla.
Gradually mix in flour, baking powder and salt.
Shape dough into 2 balls and wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight (or freeze for a couple hours).
Lightly flour your counter or surface, and roll out dough 1/4 of an inch thick.
Cut out as many shapes as possible with a cookie cutter.
Transfer shapes to ungreased cookie sheet.
Reserve the trimmings for rerolling.
Reroll the dough and the remaining dough as many times as necessary.
Bake the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10 to 13 minutes at 350F, without letting them get brown.
Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Royal Icing:

3 egg whites
3 teaspoons lemon juice
4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted

Beat the egg whites and lemon juice together.
Gradually add in the sifted sugar on low speed until smooth.
Stir in food coloring until you acquire the desired shade.
Use immediately or cover and refrigerate or it will begin to harden.

Engagement, Part Two

Really, why have just one engagement party when you can have two? More loot, more partying, more time with family and friends, and of course, more baked goods. So while a cake sufficed for Racheli and Shaya's engagement celebration, part one, part two required iced and decorated cookies with the bride and groom's names on them. And here I am to deliver.
I've only done this once before, and those left a little more room for error, since they were just a variety of cookies decorated with lines and squiggles and dots and the like. These were to be uniform - half with the bride's name and half with the groom's.

Let the fun begin.
Of course I set up my decorating station, complete with toothpicks, water, racks, food coloring, icing bags, tips, couplers, paper towels and cans of fresca (not for cookie decorating purposes). Half the cookies were to be iced with blue and the name written in pink, and half iced in pink and the name written in blue.
I chose to use a fairly thin icing and a #5 tip for the base coat - I outlined each cookie first, then squiggled lines inside, using a toothpick to gently nudge the icing in to place. A process which took about 3 and a half hours for the about 100 cookies. I baked exactly 127 cookies, of which about 120 made it to the first coat of icing, about 110 made it past the first round, and about 90 made it all the way. But more on that later.

The writing. I hate writing. You know I hate writing. I've told you before. I'm not good at it. It gives me nightmares. Heart palpitations. Breathing problems. Gray hair. But here I was about to write on 100 cookies.

I started with the "Shaya" cookies, since, with five letters, it seemed like less of a challenge than the seven-letter "Racheli."

And it went pretty well. As I got in to the hang of it it got a little easier.
But there were still plenty for the reject bin.

Which kept growing.
After I finished those, it was on to the Racheli cookies. Racheli, with a whole seven letters.
Much easier to screw up. And screw up I did.

Every time I ruined a cookie, I would take it out on the cookie.

Sometimes I would get madder than other times.
Anyway, I managed to get these done as well, and while the collateral damage was a little higher here, there were still a few cookies that made it through.
And the reject bin grew:
Finally, I was done with everything, and the cookies were all laid out.

My friend Shira, who was perched at the end of the table watching as I hunched over the 2 inch cookies and as I didn't realize that four hours had passed, pointed out that the cookies suffered from the "Cheerleader Effect." First defined on the TV show "How I Met Your Mother," the cheerleader effect refers to the fact that when you see a group of people together, they might seem attractive, but when you look at them each individually, they're not. Same goes with these cookies.

Look at them as a group!
Get in close and...hmmm.
Look at that one on the bottom right. Eeks.
Whatever.
They were eaten. In fact, I didn't hear a single complaint. That wasn't from me anyhow.

Tip of the Day: For more tips on cookie decorating see my previous post. Is that a cop-out? Maybe.

Recipe:
Sugar Cookies:
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter or margarine
2 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
4 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt

Beat together butter and sugar until light and creamy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla.
Gradually mix in flour, baking powder and salt.
Shape dough into 4 balls and wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight (or freeze for a couple hours).
Lightly flour your counter or surface, and roll out dough 1/4 of an inch thick.
Cut out as many shapes as possible with a cookie cutter.
Transfer shapes to ungreased cookie sheet.
Reserve the trimmings for rerolling.
Reroll the dough and the remaining dough as many times as necessary.
Bake the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10 to 13 minutes at 350F, without letting them get brown.
Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Makes about 120 2-inch hearts. Leave plenty of spares for screwing up!

Royal Icing:

3 egg whites
3 teaspoons lemon juice
4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted

Beat the egg whites and lemon juice together.
Gradually add in the sifted sugar on low speed until smooth.
Use immediately or cover and refrigerate or it will begin to harden.

A Cookie, A Wedding, A New Beginning

Last week, my friends Shiffy and Noam got married. And the weekend before the wedding, us girls got together for one last pre-wedding gathering to bond, talk, sing, and of course, eat.

So when my friend Miryam challenged me to create decorated cookies for the event, I accepted her gauntlet, even though I'd never done it before.

And so a very long day began...and ended with 80 pretty, frosted, delicious cookies.
Though I'm sure many of you have done this before, this was my first time, and I was a little nervous. The cookies have two components: the sugar cookie and the icing. Sugar cookies I've done before, and my trusty recipe came through again here. The recipe below should make about 100 heart shaped cookies - I used a 2 1/2" Wilton cutter.
I made mostly hearts, but I also made a handful of circles, and about a dozen "S" and "N" cookies - I really had no advance plan, so anything went!
The icing, however, was new. This type of icing is called royal icing, but why, I don't know. It is a simple mixture of egg whites, a small amount of liquid (I used lemon juice, but water would also work) and confectioner's sugar. A lot of confectioner's sugar. You can also add a little vanilla for flavoring (I didn't), but be careful with the amount of liquid in the recipe.

If you're not comfortable using egg whites in the icing, you can buy pasteurized eggs, powdered eggs or a product called meringue powder.

This icing is used for decorating cookies because it dries to a beautiful, shiny, hard finish - and you can add as many detail and layers as you want.

The basic recipe (below) can be thickened with more sugar or thinned with more water as needed.

Oh - and a word on food coloring. Gel food coloring is preferable, as it won't thin out your icing the way that liquid coloring will. Apply a little bit of the coloring at a time with a toothpick to the icing. And, as you know, when it comes to food coloring, less is more. You can always add color, but you can't take it out. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

My first try, I used the icing straight out of the recipe, and spread it on the cookies with the back of a teaspoon. This was the result.
My second try, with the blue icing, I thinned it out a little first with some water, and it spread out more evenly. As with the color, less is more with adding extra liquid. Even a drop of water will make a difference when mixed in

Another side note:

Actually, preface to the side note. Where did a first time cookie decorator gain all these tips? Youtube of course. Search for "cookie decorating" on the popular video sharing site, and you will be entertained for hours. That is, if you're entertained by watching people decorate cookies.

Back to the side note: There are many different ways you can put that first coat of icing on your cookies. The back of a spoon is one of them. You could also use a small paintbrush, or you could use a piping bag to pipe a line around the edge of the cookie, and fill it in with a squiggle of the icing, using a toothpick to nudge it into place.
I used every method imaginable with these cookies, and with almost a hundred to experiment with, I had a lot of trials and a few errors.

Now, I know in the past I've told you that ziploc bags and a hole cut in the corner work just as well as a piping bag - but not here. You can still use the plastic bag, but proper icing tips are essential.

As are these:For those of you who don't know, this is a coupler. To use it, you place one end inside the plastic bag, and then place the icing tip over the outside, and screw the other end of the coupler over it. This does two things. Firstly, it gives the icing tip stability, and it also enables you to switch tips without moving the icing to a new bag. For those of you who are interested, I alternated between a #2 and a #5 tip for the decorating.

Let's just say, by the end of the day, I had a dining room table covered with cookies, bowls of icing, used toothpicks, plastic bags, icing tips and food coloring. It may or may not have looked a little something like this.
After you have put the first layer of icing on, it will start to harden immediately. As will any bags or bowls of icing you leave out for too long. After about a half hour, you can add more details to your cookies, but check with your finger that you have that smooth, shiny finish first.

You don't have to give every cookie a first coat, however, and I left some without. But all the cookies got a decorating touch. Swirls, dots, lines, squigglys, and some writing - I was having fun. I stuck with three colors of icing: pink, blue and white. Practically no two cookies were the same.
The one thing that went bad during my deluxe cookie decorating bonanza, was the photography. By the time I was done, daylight was long gone, and no matter how hard I tried the photos didn't come out how I wanted. Forgive me?
After I delicately arranged each and every cookie on the platter, ate the few that wouldn't fit (about 75 of the original 90 baked cookies made it to Shiffy's house), I delivered the cookies.

The next day, at our gathering, I couldn't believe every last cookie was finished before the end of the evening. Unlike the elaborately decorated cookies you can get in the bakery, these were truly delicious as well as pretty. And hard to resist.

So I tried a new technique, Shiffy and Noam are beginning a new life together, and a new school year is just starting.

While I'll no longer have the time now that I'm back in school to spend an entire day on cookies, I'm sure there will be many more firsts, both in and outside the kitchen, ahead this year.

Tip of the Day: If you're worried about your cookies coming out well or you're a newbie like me, always make a handful more cookies then you need, so you won't be too worried if a few aren't perfect (and the ugly ones taste just as good!).

Recipe:
Sugar Cookies:
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter or margarine
2 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
4 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt

Beat together butter and sugar until light and creamy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla.
Gradually mix in flour, baking powder and salt.
Shape dough into 4 balls and wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight (or freeze for a couple hours).
Lightly flour your counter or surface, and roll out dough 1/4 of an inch thick.
Cut out as many shapes as possible with a cookie cutter.
Transfer shapes to ungreased cookie sheet.
Reserve the trimmings for rerolling.
Reroll the dough and the remaining dough as many times as necessary.
Bake the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10 to 13 minutes at 350F, without letting them get brown.
Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Royal Icing:

3 egg whites
3 teaspoons lemon juice
4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted

Beat the egg whites and lemon juice together.
Gradually add in the sifted sugar on low speed until smooth.
Use immediately or cover and refrigerate or it will begin to harden.