Cooking with Kids: Easter Egg Nest Cookies

I love Easter baking.  I don't know if it is the sweet pastel colors or the cute little animals, but I look forward to this season every year.  This year I had just the project in mind. Cute little nests full of Easter eggs, all on top of a cookie.

Back in August, my nephew came to stay at my house for a sleep over and I decided to have him "help" me bake some cookies.  Really, I had dough left over from another project so I rolled some out and let him add sprinkles and things before we baked them.  And boy was that a success.  He grinned from ear to ear during the whole thing and then he went home and he spoke of nothing other than "I made cookies with Missa" for weeks.  So when I was planning out this little project, I knew just who to hire as my sous chef.

In fact, I'm going to let the little ChooChoo explain how we made these cookies.

First Missa baked some cookies out of her favorite sugar cookie dough made with vanilla and brought them to my house.  She also brought some peanut M&Ms and royal icing tinted with brown.

Next, I helped her squeeze some of the icing in some rough circles around and around and around the cookies.

Then, I picked an M&M

And then I put the M&M right in the middle of the icing.  Missa says that three M&Ms fit best but I sometimes liked to put four in.

All done! Now we had to wait for them to dry.  I didn't like this part at all, but I went out to dinner with Mommy, Missa, Titi and Ahn so I didn't mind too much.

After dinner, the cookies were done!

Missa kept saying they were super cute, but I just think they were yummy!

Sunflower Cookie Pops

The weather has been extraordinarily glorious the last few days and to celebrate, I've spent the day today making iced tea and sitting on my balcony reading, soaking up the Vitamin D and airing out the house from all the winter mustiness.

In honor of the quickly approaching spring time, I thought I'd share this wonderful sun-flower cookie pop with you guys and hopefully it'll help brighten your day even if you haven't had to chance to get outside yet.

I'm not going to lie, this is a very Martha-esque process (just 87 easy steps!) and it will take you a few days.  But there is plenty that you can do in advance and just assemble when you are ready.  Or you can spend an entire long weekend making these cookies and then freeze them.  Your choice.  Either way, I beg you to make these.  They are perfect in any season.

Start with my favorite sugar cookies dough (I made these with lemon flavor and I think it really goes along nicely with the flower motif) and some royal icing.

Tint a little of the icing brown and then the rest of it can be tinted sunflower yellow.  To get the sunflower yellow, I used mostly yellow but then a drop or two of orange and one or two drops of brown.  Just keep playing with the icing color until you get a nice warm, golden yellow.  You'll be putting the yellow icing aside for a little while.  To store it, I split it into an outline and a flood batch and then stored the outline icing all wrapped up in the piping bags in a pint glass in the fridge with a damp paper towel at the bottom of the glass.  The flood icing was poured into a squeeze bottle and left on the counter.

For the first actual step in constructing these pretty sunflowers you'll need: a sheet of parchment paper; a small circle cookie cutter, an edible ink marker and brown royal icing loosened with a little bit of water - it shouldn't be a thin as flood icing, but you want it a little runnier than a standard outline.

Start by tracing circles onto the parchment paper.

With the parchment paper taped down, pipe the brown icing into circles following the guidelines you traced with the cookie cutter.

You need to leave these to dry for at least a day.

While the sunflower centers are drying, I went ahead and made myself some cute little leaves to tie the cellophane bag shut.  If you don't plan on bagging your sunflowers, you can skip this step.  But I think it really adds a little extra dimension to the flowers.

Using green pipe cleaners, I started by folding one in half in an wide open v- shape.  Next, fold one side about half way down and wrap the tail around the stem and back up again to make a leaf shape.  Repeat this on the other side.  You'll be able to wrap this finished product around the cookie pop stem the same way you would use a twist tie.

When the brown circles are dry, use a small offset spatula to scrape them off the parchment paper.

Meanwhile, mix up a teaspoon of meringue powder and 1/2 cup water in a cup and prepare to add some glitter in the form of brown sanding sugar.  Using a clean (food only) paint brush, apply the meringue liquid to a royal icing circle.  Dunk the circle into the sanding sugar and place it back on the parchment paper to dry.  You can see in the 3rd picture that my circles weren't COMPLETELY dry.  It definitely made them a bit messier to remove from the parchment and I lost two of them to breakage while I dipped them - but that is why I always make a few extra.

            

While the centers continue drying, it is time to make the actual cookies (finally!) Following the instructions on inserting a pop stick into a cookie and a flower shaped cookie cutter from Wilton that I bought at Michael's gave me a couple dozen of these little cuties.  Remember, always freeze/chill your cut out dough before baking and make sure you oven is hot enough to keep the spreading down.

Once the cookies were good and chilled, I laid them out on still more parchment paper to get ready for decorating.

After outlining each flower, fully fill each one with the yellow icing you had made the other day.

Using a toothpick, spread the icing to fill all the corners.

Now, very gently place one of you glittery brown circles in the center of the flower.  Be careful with this step since once you place the circle, it is hard to move around without messing up the rest of the icing.

Now let the icing dry over night before bagging them up.  I also went ahead and piped an outline around the flower giving the petals a little extra dimension.  But, I forgot to take a picture of that since it was kind of spur of the moment.

Either way, once the cookies are dry, place each one in a treat sized bag and tie the bag right under the flower with one of the pipe cleaners.

And voila! The perfect bouquet to brighten up your spring day.

Cinnamon Sugar Christmas Cookies

I believe I've mentioned how much I love my sugar cookie recipe.  I found the original recipe on Iambaker several months ago and after a few tweaks I was left with a cookie recipe that consistently gets rave reviews and is a cinch to make.  So far I've experimented with the originally suggest almond extract and my switch to lemon extract flavoring.  This was my go-to for a while.  Until one day.

I was making cookies for Christmas and I just couldn't wrap my head around using lemon extract.  I didn't want the almond extract as I wasn't completely in love with that flavor.  I also couldn't shake the idea of a yummy snickerdoodle.  But snickerdoodles aren't roll/cut cookies.  They spread and have a sugary coating that keeps them from being iced.  Still, I couldn't be dissuaded.  So I decided, what the hell, I'd try it.  I love my original recipe, so I decided to use that as a jumping off point.  And I must say - without any modesty - that I may have even topped myself in the deliciousness factor.  And after a couple of missteps with decorating, I think they turned out pretty cutely too.

I started by creaming 3 sticks of SALTED butter with 2 cups of sugar.

Once the butter and the sugar are good and creamy, add in two egg yolks

Mix until they are blended in and then add in two whole eggs.

Finally, add in a tablespoon of vanilla extract.

While the wet ingredients are being creamed together, it is time to mix the dry ingredients.  To four cups of flour, add a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder and a teaspoon of cinnamon.

Little tip from Martha - you can use a whisk to stir this all together instead of sifting it.  Works for me!

Very slowly add a cup at a time of the dry ingredients to the creamed butter and eggs.  Only mix it enough each time to barely incorporate the flour mixture into the butter.  You don't want to over mix at this stage or you could end up with tough cookies.

When I finished with the last batch of flour mixture, turn all the dough out onto a sheet of plastic wrap.

Wrap the dough into a cylinder and store in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day, roll out the dough to about 1/4 inch thick.  I always roll my cookies on a piece of parchment paper so that clean up is nice and easy.  I also line my baking sheets with parchment paper.  Basically - when there is a sale on parchment paper, I stock up!

In addition to the 3 different size circles, I also cut out some Christmas trees.  Make sure to put the cookies in the freezer for 15 - 30 minutes before baking.

Bake for 10 -12 minutes at 350.  If your oven runs a little cool (like mine does) you can push the temperature up to 375.  Just start checking the cookies at 10 minutes.  The reason for this is you don't want the oven temp to be too low or your cookies could spread into blobs.

The cookie on the left is baked at 350, cookie on the right at 375.  The difference in spreading is slight but important

Once all the cookies are cooled, it is time to decorate. I decided on three different decorations for my trees and circles:

Trees:
When I made the first batch of these cookies a few weeks ago as a tester, Hubby picked up one of the pieces of white chocolate I had just unmolded for another project and put it ion top of the still warm cookie.  It melted.  And once it solidified again, this time coating the entire cookie, it was tremendous.  Because of this, I decided I wanted to coat the trees in green white chocolate.

Full disclosure - this was a mess.  I originally put the melted chocolate into a piping bag to make layered levels of needles on the tree.  About half way through, I realized it wasn't going to work so I just started spreading the chocolate.  But some of it was already dry.  So they were a lumpy mess.

They still tasted amazing, but I was hesitant to put them out on a buffet table looking like my 2 year old nephew had run his hands through them.  What was I going to do? Well, if watching Debbie Decorates Dallas has taught me one thing, it is that anything will look pretty if covered in enough glue and sparkles, so I reached for the baking equivalent - royal icing and sparkly sanding sugar.

I made "garlands" out of royal icing

Dunked the cookie in the sugar

And voila! A decent looking and delicious cinnamon sugar Christmas tree covered in white chocolate.

Next up were the large and medium circles.  I had it in my mind that I wanted to make snow flakes.  And again, I wanted to use white chocolate.  And again, it was a mess.  Note to self: self, white chocolate is not an easy swap for royal icing, it is more for a drizzle.

To hide the squiggly lines and uneven edges, I once again turned to my glue and sparkles.

I put a dot of royal icing at each point of the snow flake.

And after putting the cookie face down into a plate of sanding sugar, you couldn't even see all the uneven lines, all you could see was sparkle.

Finally, after reading Glorious Treats' blog I wanted to do some cute little snowballs out of the smallest size circle cookie.

I started out by outlining and filling the cookies with royal icing.

Next, I put four cookies at a time face down into some sanding sugar and give them a light press to really set the sugar.

Finally, place them on a drying rack overnight to dry. The pictures don't really do these little cuties justice.  They are so sparkly and the texture is so nice.

Usually when I make cookies, they are all the same.  Which is nice.  But sometimes, I like to see a little variation on a platter and these were perfect for my Christmas party.  I love the way the platter looks with the green of the trees, the lightness of the snowflakes and the little pops of sparkly snowballs.  And they are all tied together with the use of the sanding sugar so they still look cohesive.

I hope you and your families have a wonderful Christmas and I'll be back and posting more next week.

Shopping List for Cinnamon Sugar Cookies - makes about 50 cookies, depending on size. 

• 3 Sticks SALTED Butter
• 2 Cups Sugar
• 2 Egg Yolks
• 2 Eggs
• 1 Tablespoon Vanilla Extract
• 4 Cups Flour
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• 1 Teaspoon Baking Powder
• 1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
• Royal Icing and/or Candy Melts and/or Sanding Sugar For Decorating