Team Shambles
While we were writing up all of our posts from our first pastry class, we noticed that we had posted 199 times! In order to celebrate in a minor way, we decided to decorate cookies for post #200 🙂
Roopa had some fondant left over from her Earl Grey Tea Cakes so we decided to recreate a watercolour effect similar to the one Sweetapolita used in her Bake Book.
The first time Alana used a watercolour effect, the colours were painted directly onto cookie cutouts rather than onto fondant. Painting onto the fondant worked out better for a few reasons. Firstly, the food colouring changed colour with the baking process, so the colours were muted after baking. Secondly, the cookies expanded, so the colours all cracked. Lastly, the food colouring doesn’t change the consistency of fondant (assuming you don’t oversaturate it), but the cookies get soft and prone to indentations when you paint them directly. If you want to paint right onto the cookies, it would probably be prudent to do so after baking.
We used purple fondant for our cookies because that’s what we had available, but a white fondant would allow the colours of the dye to really come through.
Alana gettin’ her art on
We wanted to keep things pretty simple – the focus was mostly on the decoration – so we went with this sugar cookie recipe. Admittedly, this caused a little bit of grief. They’re relatively buttery as far as sugar cookies go, and humid Vancouver kitchens don’t deal with dough all that well. They were super sticky and required extensive freezing and chilling time.
SUGAR COOKIES
INGREDIENTS
- 85 g unsalted butter, softened
- ½ granulated sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1-¼ cake flour
- ½ tsp. baking powder
- ¼ tsp. salt
DIRECTIONS
- Cream butter and sugar together in stand mixer until smooth.
- Add egg and vanilla and mix until thoroughly combined.
- Mix together dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Gradually add dry mixture to wet mixture at a low speed. Don’t over mix.
- Chill dough until rollable, and then roll to 1/4″ thickness.
- Cut out cookies, and refrigerate the cookie pans prior to baking.
- Bake for ~7 minutes.
Notes:
- We baked these at 400F, but would consider a lower temperature next time, as the bottoms burnt too quickly.
Cheers!
Chateau Gateau 