Oliver & Mummy Make Christmas Sugar Cookies

Well - my little Oliver has been a rather poorly little bogwoppit this week. Thankfully, he seems a bit better today and well enough to go to the nursery Christmas party today.

Oliver and I made these sugar cookies last weekend.... Or should I say - I made the dough. He watched it in the mixer. helped to roll it and stamp out the cookies. Mummy put the icing on and Oliver dipped them in sprinkles.

Not bad for a team effort !

They are good and hard and should easily keep in their cellophane bags for about a month. I thought they would make lovely little gifts for Oliver to give to friends and relatives this Christmas. We also made a pile for the nursery staff and his class teacher...which I'll let Oliver take with him today.

I spotted a really neat cookie cutter set online with Williams-Sonoma.com and knew we could have some seriously good fun with it. The only disappointing bit is that they only ship within the USA - so the only way we could get this was via Ebay.

I'm glad we did ! There are three cutters in the set - a snowflake, Christmas bauble and a gingerbread man. All have the facility via a plunger to stamp letters and words into your cookies.

Christmas Sugar cookies

4 cups plain flour
225g butter (salted)
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
vanilla essence - 2 tsp
mixed spice - 3 tsp
water - enough only to combine the dough

Beat sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add and beat in the egg and vanilla. Combine flour, baking powder and spice with the beaten mixture. You will  need to add a tiny bit of water to make it combine into a pliable dough.

I then split my dough batch into three. In two of the batches, I added some gel sugar paste and a teaspoon more of water and mixed it through.

We rolled out the dough on our new silicone work mat. This is a brand new product to us and I'm totally in love with it.

The work mats are HUGE. 640mm x 450mm - that's 25" long x 18" wide.

The have markings for english / imperial measurements (ie inches) along two sides and metric / cms on the other two sides. The are also marked with various diameter circles for rolling out pastry and icing. I have had super success rolling out fondant on it. I just rubbed a tiny bit of Trex / veg shortening on to the surface and got rolling. Absolutely no extra icing sugar required for rolling. Likewise, it's a dream for rolling pastry and kneading bread.

The silicone is very different to the feel of what our baking tray liners and moulds are. It's kind of stretchy - almost like a wetsuit. It grips beautifully to work surfaces. Do note that it's not meant for cutting on. You will easily cut right through it with a knife. Saying that, I trimmed some strips of fondant on it for my mums cake (see previous blog entry) but did so with great care and using a very old and blunt dinner knife and the lightest of pressure. Worked a dream. Saves my work tops getting claggy after kneading bread dough or rolling pastry. A simple wipe of a cloth and it's ready to fold or roll and put away.

It's marked with cirular rolling guides up to 16" diameter too which is mega handy.

These silicone bakeware work mats / rolling mats will be available from Monday for £7.99 each

Sarah-Jane Nash, http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ - December 2010