Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Sugar Cookies - for Halloween


Last Halloween, my son, then 10 months old, was dressed as a tiger. This time I got him a pumpkin costume. One of his friend's mom from his playgroup is hosting a Halloween party this week. Decorating these pumpkin-shaped cookies sounded like fun so I decided to make them for his cute little friends.


After scouting for a while, I came across this recipe on Food Network, by Alton Brown. 

Ingredients :
3 cups APF (I used maida)
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tbsp milk

Method :
Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and milk and beat further. 



Combine flour, baking powder and salt and add to the above little by little, beating until dough forms.




Divide the dough into two and refrigerate for 2 hours.


This is where I made a big mistake. I made the dough, refrigerated it and went to put my toddler to sleep. I was so exhausted, I decided to bake the cookies the next morning and fell asleep.

When I started rolling the dough the next day, this is what happened :




The dough had become hard and started to crack as I rolled it. I patched it up carefully. Next time I make this I'm going to use up the dough within two hours! 



The recipe asks us to roll out the dough on powdered sugar instead of flour, to 1/4th inch thick. Using a cookie cutter, cut the rolled out dough into desired shape. I used a pumpkin shaped cutter. Remove the extra scraping and keep aside. You can roll them out again for more cookies.


Arrange atleast 1 inch apart on a greased cookie sheet [I lined mine with parchment paper]. 


Bake in a preheated oven at 375ºF for about 7 to 9 minutes [mine took 8 minutes] or till the edges start browning. Cool on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes and transfer onto a wire rack to cool completely. (The centers will be slightly soft but will harden as they cool)


Repeat for the next batch, till you finish all the dough.


To decorate the cookies, I used Wilton's buttercream icing.

I took a little bit of icing and added green food colour. I added orange colour to the rest of the icing. For the black colour, I used store bought icing because I have had terrible experiences trying to colour the icing black. You can even use chocolate chips for the eyes.
To decorate the cookies, the tips I used were 5, 12, 18 and 1M.



Here's hoping my son's little friends enjoy eating these decorated cookies as much as I enjoyed making them.


These cookies go to Food Palate Series.

Comments:


30 comments:

  1. Aparna looks fab! hope ur son and friends have a blast! wonderful effort!

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  2. Apu fab presentation....great job yaar.ur pics are perfect....just dont need explaination....
    love the recipe.
    Biny

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  3. Wow......Thats simply amazing...Tempting cookies , perfect for little ones

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  4. lovely cooking dear...wish u a happy halloween in advance

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  5. Hi Aparna,

    Looks fabulous...My dauhgter too loves cookies...:)

    Dr.Sameena@

    www.myeasytocokrecipes.blogspot.com

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  6. Apy m gona try this sometime.... Luks so so nice :)

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  7. Lovely cookies..perfect for kids :)

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  8. Love the cookies n the wonderful clicks too !!!

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  9. They look absolutely adorable, but you have to show us the costume as well. I suspect it is adorable too.

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  10. wow...those pumpkins look amazing....nicely decorated cookies..

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  11. Wonderful..fabulous presentation dear.

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  12. Sugar cookies looks cute and beautiful.

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  13. looks so cute, you have done it really well aparna..

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  14. Pretty looking sugar cookies..fabulous!

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  15. awesome cookies, love your decoration, beautiful

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  16. Wow! Awesome!! Beautiful decoration.

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  17. Thumbs Up for ur presentation ! loved the first pic :)

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  18. cookies look beautiful and delicious thank you for linking

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  19. Your Halloween cookies are absolutely gorgeous. Never seen prettier pumpkins. :)

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  20. The cookies are so cute and so well shot. That's the reason I'm sharing the lovely blog award with you. Please accept it from my space :)

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  21. Wow Aparna! Those are simply amazing! I was just thinking of making sugar cookies from Alton Brown's sometime soon! :) You can check out his episode "Cookie Clause" on his program Good Eats. Gives nice tips. Anyway.. Happy Halloween!

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  22. OMG - these pumpkin cookies look absolutely adorable.

    Thanks for stopping by my blog and commenting - I appreciate your visit.

    Sue :-)

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  23. wow!!! pumpkin cookies look toooooooooo delicious

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  24. Pumpkin cookies sound like great fun, ur sons must have enjoyed these. 1 M tip?? I want one, I want one, no make that two;-)

    Have shared an award with you, please accept..

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  25. wow! These sugar cookies look so beautiful :-)

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  26. Aparna these look superb! Your son and friends are lucky to have you! They sure had a blast! Excellent work with these pumpkin styled cookies!

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