cooooooookies

sorry for not posting yesterday but i had a good reason - i was prepping for a girls night that i had yesterday night! as much as i don't particularly care for the day of valentines i do love all the things that lead up to it... pink and red, hearts, the excuse to buy people gifts, making valentines and making heart shaped food.

so after i got off work yesterday i came home and baked the cookies we were gonna decorate. they turned out pretty well, so if you wanna try the recipe i used heart-shaped sugar cookie cutouts from marthastewart.com with a few modifications of my own. they ended up being more of a slightly crunchy shortbread type cookie but that worked out well for decorating. plus with all the icing we put on them i'm sure they're sweet enough for even the sweetest tooth.

so to make these cookies i did the following:

the night before (thursday night) i mixed together 4 cups of all purpose flour, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt in a bowl and stirred it around with a fork (that is my version of "sifting").

next i took 2 sticks of salted butter (the recipe says unsalted but who buys that) and since i never have any at room temperature i microwaved it on 10% power until it was soft. once soft i threw it in the mixer with 2 cups sugar and let it mix together, then added the 2 eggs and 2 TBSP lemon juice (i didn't have a real lemon so i just used lemon juice from a jar.. it worked fine). i let that mix around a bit and then added in my flour a little at a time until combined. then i took the dough split it into 2 flattened balls, covered them in plastic wrap and set them in the fridge to chill overnight.

friday afternoon after work i took the chilled dough out and it was hard as a brick. i'm pretty sure it took more than 10 min to become workable (like the recipe promises.. liar) but after some rays of sun and some serious kneading by my part, the dough was soft enough to roll out. (now if i was a patient person it probably would have worked fine to just pull out the dough and let it slowly come to room temperature before i worked with it, but i'm impatient so i sped the process along). the recipe says to take the dough out one disc at a time and keep the other chilled.. but after realizing how hard it was i pulled out the other one and let it soften while i worked with the first half of dough.

now here's where i majorly deviate from the recipe. i read section number 3 of the recipe and it sounded like such a hassle.. rolling the dough out between pieces of plastic wrap and then cutting out and then re-chilling and then putting them on specially positioned racks in the oven. psh.. some recipes are difficult and multi-step.. sugar cookies should not be one of them. so at this point i just did what i wanted.

i lightly floured the counter and proceeded to roll out my sugar cookie dough. it was completely fine.. didn't stick.. actually it was a lot easier dough to work with than normal sugar cookie dough. i wanted to make rather large hearts and didn't have a cookie cutter that big, but we did have a porcelain heart decoration that i ended up using as a trace and just cut the cookies out with a knife.

next they went on the greased cookie pan.

and then into the oven.

parker kept me company while i baked.... isn't he the cutest?

the finished cookies... plain and ready to decorate!

everything set out and ready for the girls night.

then i took a nap. a long one. when i woke up i forgot i was having a party. then i remembered and realized it was 30 minutes until people arrived. lol.

katherine arrived and we started making and dye-ing the royal icing. i forget the recipe for that but look in any royal icing recipe.. if it contains powdered sugar, egg whites, vanilla and cream of tartar you're on the right track. we also had a container of store bought butter cream icing that we used as well.

my sister kat, ivy and her friend jenn came over and we had a fantastical time decorating cookies, listening to adele and cat power, eating brownies and commenting on how cute ashton kutcher is as we watched valentine's day.

valentine's day (2010)

click here to see the trailer.

if you have not seen valentine's day it is a wonderful movie and as aforementioned, kutcher is really adorable in it.


















and finally.... TA DA! the finished cookies.

and ivy's awesome heartbeat cookie. it was one of my favorites.

so thats the end of this enormous blog post. if you read it... good for you.

and if you've never had a cookie decorating party.. you should. its lots of fun.