Friday, December 24, 2010

Photo-bombing Llama (Cookies)

When I am not drawing or writing or being exceedingly painfully awesome, I enjoy cooking and baking.  Part of that is decorating cookies, even though my hands are not as cooperative as they once were in my early 20s (as you can see in the photos below).
Each year, I send my friends around the country little packages of goodies.  This year, in the spirit of this blarg, I though I would make some funny cookies to go in with the fancy ones.  So my friends received a package of cookies that began with these very serious looking cookies:


and then behind that lovely snowy scene they found this:

LLAMA
PHOTOBOMB!

I thought of doing a blue whale but whales really don't like skiing.


I used my favorite recipe for the cookies, which you can find after the jump:
Cream Cheese Cutouts

1 (2 sticks) cup butter
3 ounce package of cream cheese
1 cup white sugar
1 egg yolk
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon vanilla powder


Using an electric mixer cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar together until light and fluffy. 
Add the egg yolk and the vanilla. 
Stir in the flour using the lowest speed. 
Gather the dough into a ball, place in zipper bag, flatten, and chill overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
On a lightly floured board, roll dough out to a thickness of 3/16 inch. Cut into desired shapes and place onto parchment lined baking sheet.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 12 minutes or until edges are lightly browned. Let cool.



Icing Recipe (adapted from  I am baker )

2 cup powder sugar
1 tablespoon cream
2 tablespoon milk
2 drop almond extract
2 tablespoon light corn syrup


Combine powder sugar, corn syrup, cream and almond extract in the bowl of a mixer on low (to avoid covering the kitchen with powdered sugar).
Add milk a drop at a time to the desired consistency (see notes) and stir to combine.
Portion into small bowls as needed and add color as desired.

Important Notes:
If you need a thicker frosting, say for outlining your cookies, add LESS milk. Just a drop at a time.

If you have already outlined your cookies and need a to fill in or ’spill’ your cookies, you can add more milk (as much as you would need) to make your frosting very runny.

If you are using liquid food coloring (the kind in the dropper bottles), be sure to use LESS milk. They can make your frosting more runny. If you are using a gel food coloring, your milk quanity can remain the same.

If you want to add different flavors, you can add drops of vanilla extract, almond extract, lemon, etc. to flavor your frosting.

If you want more SHINE, use more corn syrup and less milk.

This frosting will stay good for days in the fridge.

5 comments:

  1. These are awesome! Your friends are so lucky. I'd pee my pants laughing if I got a llama photobomb cookie. Admittedly, after three kids, that's not hard but don't let that diminish how much I do indeed love your cookie creations!

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  2. They enjoyed them thoroughly and I had one left that I actually sent to the person who won my Christmas contest on here as an extra surprise! =D

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  3. I love love love!! Question: How did you manage to get all the tiny details? Unless I'm wrongly estimating the scale of the awesome cookies?

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  4. they are ABOUT the size of the second picture... maybe a little smaller, but only a smidgen.
    I used ziplock bags to pipe the details and just cut off the tiniest of corners to make the small details. It took me, I think 5 hours total, for 24 cookies.

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  5. Wow, that's insane. And I imagine you have to do it in layers in order to not just have a runny mess.

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