So the other day I decided that Adam and I should make Christmas cookies. I had purchased a set of Christmas cutters and decorating equipment from Lakeland (which is no longer on it’s website, which is odd) that included a recipe for sugar cookies so I got the ingredients out and went to work.
I don’t have an electric mixer, so I used my food processor instead. This was probably a mistake, although the instruction book that came with the processor says it should work. Let’s see what happened:
Sugar and butter. So far, so good...
Adam, was, of course my helper here:
Adam keeps an eye on the timer for the creaming process.
After the butter and sugar was creamy, about 3 minutes like the recipe said, I added an egg and let it mix further. And then added the flour, 1/2 cup at a time. The recipe said after 2 cups of flour I should have a ball of dough:
I wouldn't call that dough. More like batter.
I poured it out of the processor and into a big bowl at this point and proceeded to dump all the plain flour in the house into the mix…
In the interest of full discloser, I should note here that I actually had an entire canister of plain flour still on the shelf. I just completely forgot it was there. This is probably a good thing…
All my flour...still pretty much not dough...
I decided, thinking I had used all my flour, to let it chill and see what happened:
Not a circle of dough. More like a lump.
I took it out of the ‘fridge and tried to roll it out, using self rising flour to flour the board. It didn’t work too well…
Perhaps it's art...
Adam had been watching eagerly and pressing the cookie cutters in, getting confused when mummy would then roll the, to him, perfect cookies back up and try rolling it out again, with even more self rising flour.
Yeah. Big lump of non-dough...
I finally put it back into the fridge for another hour and, miracle of miracles, it started to work!
The first batch. With holes poked in the top. That way if they were totally inedible we could hang them on the tree.
But they worked! They cooked! And kinda tasty. Well, sort of tasty. In truth I couldn’t get unsalted butter (I have now found a source!) so used salted and then guestimated how much more salt to put in and it was too much. But they didn’t taste horrid. Just a bit salty and over floury. I can live with that!
A bit over cooked but my oven is very iffy. ::nods::
Next up, of course, came the colouring process:
Adam stirs the colour into the icing.
Again, I should really check my cupboards before I start doing this sort of thing. I thought I had red food colouring. I was wrong. I also thought I had a ton of icing sugar. WRONG!
Shhhh. Artist at work!
So the cookies are teal, as Adam mixed together the green and blue icing we made. And only half of them were iced.
But it was a fun morning with my son. And the cookies were most definitely edible!
Good job! Looks like fun. We had a similar incident trying to make gingerbread men and the dough was so wet it just stuck to the counter and the rolling pin. We kept adding flour but to no avail. Then realised that we had put the wrong amount of water in!!
I love it that they ended up teal-coloured. I always have that problem with the dough that it stick to everything. I once got my hands completely stuck whilst experimenting with a brioche dough, thankfully I was not alone and got help getting them out.
I think that if you use salted butter you don’t need to add any other salt.
Well done!
I never bother getting unsalted butter – and the greeny colour is perfect for Christmas trees.
Ha. You are just like me. I decide to bake and get halfway through the recipe before realising that I am missing half the ingredients.
If I don’t have unsalted butter, I don’t add any extra salt. Seems to work out ok.