Angry Bird and Bad Piggie Cookies - For An Angry Bird Fan !

When only an Angry Bird cookie will do, Mummy has to get baking !

Oliver is currently a HUGE fan of Angry Birds and has all but taken over my Ipad. So much so, that we've had to enforce restrictions on how long he gets to play. The easiest thing is to only ever partially charge the thing and play dumb when the battery goes flat !

So, this challenge was to create Angry bird cookies. In the end, I made a load of red birds, black birds and bad piggies.

First of all, I found a picture of a red bird and blew it up on the photo copier, then drew round it with a black marker. This gave me a template to carefully cut out the cookies with a craft knife.

Note - take extreme care cutting on top of a silicone work / rolling mat. High chance of cutting through it ! However, if you are careful and used to doing it (as I do), you should do just fine.

The Everlasting Cinnamon Sugar Cookie Recipe.....

Wondering why I call it this ? 

Well - I roll these cookies thin. Once they have been baked long enough, they come out really rather hard.

I like a crunchy biscuit that would stand up to dunking in tea. Wrap them individually and make them air tight, and these cookies will still be good to eat in 6 months !

Actually, my aunt had some on her Christmas tree in December that I baked back in 2010. I'm very surprised some mice didnt find them stored in her loft and come for a nibble..... Although they looked ok - I don't think they'd still be good for eating.

4 cups plain flour (250ml measure)

225g butter (salted)
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
vanilla essence - 2 tsp
ground cinnamon - 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.

Roll out to about 4mm thick and then cut out your cookies.

After cutting out, put your cookies in the FREEZER for 15 minutes or more. Actually - you can leave them in there for a month if required before baking. If putting in a stack in the freezer, make sure you put some cellophane between them to make separating them easy later.

The purpose of freezing them is to make sure they hold their shape and do not spread during baking.

Heat oven to approx 170deg C fan, and bake for approx 18 mins until edges are starting to gain a little colour. Remove from oven when done and allow to cool on a rack.

I then flood iced these cookies to look like Angry Birds

For my royal icing, I make up one sachet of dried egg whites with the recommended amount of water as per packed instructions. Add powdered sugar and mix until a very firm and stiff consistency. Then, add a tiny bit of hot, boiled water or some JIF lemon juice to thin to required consistency.

How about some brush embroidered cookies. They look so sweet !

Sarah-Jane Nash - www.siliconemoulds.com

Cookie Jar Envy ? Button Sugar Cookies.

 

Okay. I admit it. I get cookie jar envy.

All these gorgeous cookies I see on other people's blogs make me seriously envious. I want to make cookies that look just like those. The only thing is, I'm not REALLY a cookie fan..... but they look so darn good.

The only cookies Oliver likes are the seriously chocolatey cookies I make. Those and the pistachio ones (never blogged those yet) are the only type we really like.

I must say though, after making and photographing these, I'm ENVIOUS of my OWN cookies ! Not that they are mine really..... I sent them to my mum. But they are so pretty I felt like cuddling them :-)

How sad is that.... !

I made the button cookies in our GREAT BIG BUTTONS silicone bakeware mold. This button style mould has proved extremely popular in the smaller size for making chocolate buttons and for cupcake toppers.

This mould is ideal for great big chocolate buttons, cookies, boiled sugar candies, beeswax, hand soaps etc.

Don't they look cute ?

I also made this EDIBLE gift tag from Belgian Chocolate. Yes - I can up with two different new mould designs to make edible gift tags. One mould makes large edible tags (like big luggage labels) and the other one makes two sizes of smaller edible gift tags suitable for smaller gifts or to put on top of cupcakes.

There are a range of different sentiments in each cavity, and some blank ones for icing / piping your own message.

I so WANT it. Why can't someone send this to me ? Doubt that will ever happen. Maybe I should make some more. Steve, roll over. I want to cuddle the cookie jar.... haha - maybe just a bit too far....

This is some resin pieces made in the same mould. I later turned these into hair slides, but they would make awesome zip pulls or mobile phone charms too.

  

The biggest button cookie is 2" / 50mm diameter and the smaller one is 1.3/8" / 35mm diameter.

The large tag is 4" / 100mm long. The smaller tags are 55mm and 35mm long. The mold even makes the hole in the tag for you to thread your ribbon!  I did a blog post recently about tempering chocolate which you may find helpful.

Here is the sugar cookie recipe I used :

225g salted butter

225g white granulated sugar
480g plain flour

1 large egg, plus a yolk

1/2 tsp baking powder

2tsp vanilla extract

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in egg and yolk. Add flour and baking powder, then bring together to a dough.

As you are baking this in a mould, there is no need to refrigerate the dough prior to baking (stops it spreading)  as when in the mould, it has nowhere to go !

Preheat the oven to 160deg C fan.

Pinch off pieces of the dough and press into the cavities. I baked the large ones first and the smaller ones separately. It you want to be exact, I used 18g for the large cells and 7g for the small cells. Actually, I found it  really quick to pre-weight loads of little pieces of dough and squish them in rather than trying to remove excess by overfilling.

Bake for approx 10 mins until just starting to colour. Remove from oven and tip out the cookies on to the baking tray. I then popped them back into the oven - approx 5 mins for the large ones and 3 mins for the small ones just to finish off the other side. Of course, you could bake the full time in the mould, I'm probably being over picky !

Go forth, bake cookies and be happy :-)

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

Cockrell / Chicken Sugar Cookies

It's been a while since my first attempt at sugar cookies. I thought I'd make some more as they are easy trasnportable and keep quite well. The recipe is exactly the same as I used last time - although I decided that this attempt I'd use rolled fondant instead of flooding with liquid icing. I baked them on silicone baking tray liners.

Unfortunately, my new paint brush is totally useless and the bristles stick out in all directions and made rather scratchy looking marks. I managed some basic decoration painting food colouring on to the icing - but it wasn't fit for fine detail

Sugar cookies transport well as little boxed gifts in the post. I actually made a whole batch of these and they're going to the retired gentleman up the road when I collect Henny Penny from him. Henny Penny took very poorly a couple of weeks ago and I'm very thankful he's managed to nurse her back to health.

Sugar Cookies - Blossom Sugar Art

I recently bought a few cookie cutters - an aeroplane, helicopter, space shuttle and a teapot. I've got a toddler that I can use as a good excuse to make cookies. Maybe getting creative with sugar cookies is one way to becoming a Yummy Mummy !

One of Oliver's little friends (Max) was one year old last week.

Happy Birthday Max !

It was Max's birthday tea on Friday, so I thought I'd try out making sugar cookies for the first time. I'm notoriously useless with icing - unless you can slather it on with a spatula. PLEASE don't give me a piping bag unless you want to see a major disaster..

Anyway, I found this super website http://www.blossomsugarart.co.uk/

They've got a very useful 7 part tutorial email all about making and icing sugar cookies. It's very step by step, along with photos - incredibly useful.

I decided I'd have a go, and made my sugar cookies this morning. Baked them on silicone baking tray liners in my fan oven as per the instructions.  Expecting a sticky disaster, I attempted icing them this evening.

Well - I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. I did have to add a little more water to the icing mix than instructed - but other than that.... it really was pretty easy. I managed with a paper icing bag to make a "1" on the space shuttles and helicopters. Much more than that would certainley have been a disaster - as my paper piping bag was disintigrating !

With the extra cookie dough, I cut out and iced a few teapots. I'm intending to box those up in a handmade box and send them in the post as a little present. I'd love to do some fancy icing bits on top - but I did have a go and made a right cod's ear of that. Still - it tasted nice !

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