Baking, Drawing, Tasting

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Yesterday at about 10 at night I was decorating the rest of cookies I baked a day before for the Halloween party with my older students.

The original idea was - to bake two types of cookies and one decorate as pumpkins and the other one decorate with bats.

On Wednesday I baked two types of cookies as I knew I wouldn´t have any time to do so on Thursday. But the whole baking thing took longer than I had expected and I had to decorate them on Thursday after all. So about 10 at night I made the icings, decorated the cookies and then waited another hour until the icings solidified.

The result is - well, let´s check by yourselves:

The first problem was that I had to cut the "pumpkins" out by myself, so the shapes are the way they are (my grandfather: "Oh honey, they are so cute. What are they? Small rockets?" - I love him anyway:-)

The second problem was the black edible colouring to give pumpkins their faces and to draw bats. I couldn´t buy it anywhere. As Halloween is not celebrated here, the black colouring is very rare to need (and I didn´t have time to check all shops in the town..).

So I bought a blue colouring which seemed to be the closest to the black one (the other possibilities were red, orange and yellow), made icing and started to draw.

And that was the third problem - I wasn´t able to draw them! After first five cookies decorated with my bats I stopped trying to draw another ones. Because all those five cookies looked like clowns´ heads or quadriplegic butterflies. So I changed the pattern and the rest was drawn with something unspecified.

The cookies looked the way they looked, but they were really tasty (luckily) and were eaten in a very short time.
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I haven´t been posting any recipe yet so let´s change it. Here you are:

Vanilla Cookies

1 cup of butter

2 cups of granulated sugar (or vanilla sugar)

2 eggs

1 dessert spoon of vanilla extract

4 and 1/2 cups of flour

pinch of salt

4 dessert spoons of baking-powder

1/2 cup of milk

Mix the sugar and butter and make mousse. Add eggs and vanilla extract and stir the mixture. Then add flour, salt and baking-powder and stir thoroughly. At the end, add the milk and stir again.

If the dough is tough enough, you can cut the shapes out. Then the dough should be 6 millimetres high at most. If it is not tough enough (depends on the amount of butter), you can make small balls which spread in the oven a bit.

We bake the cookies on the greaseproof paper for about 8 to 10 minutes. The temperature in the oven should be about 190 °C.

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Chocolate-butter Cookies

3/4 cup of butter

1/2 cup of granulated sugar

1 yolk

1 dessert spoon of almond extract

1 and 1/2 cups of flour

1/4 cup of cocoa powder (unsweetened)

Make a mousse from butter and sugar. Add a yolk, almond extract and stir the mixture. Then add flour and cocoa powder and make dough.

Then you can cut the different shapes out, or make small balls (about 2,5 centimetres big) and bake them on greaseproof paper for about 7 to 9 minutes. The temperature in the oven should be about 190°C.

If you decide to bake small balls, you can cover them in the icing sugar after taking out from the oven.

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Tomorrow I am going to post here some pictures from the the Halloween (let´s say) party with my older students. They weren´t wearing any costumes (they thought they are too old to wear them - they were wrong) but still they were so sweet!:-)

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