Shortbread cookies {Recipe}

Can you believe it's February already?!  Where did January go?  Gosh, the year is getting off to a quick start and we've only just finished our Christmas cake!  Valentine's Day is just around the corner and I thought these cookies would be perfect as a gift for someone you love or just for yourself.  They are YUMMY!  I made the cookies using a puppy cutter (isn't it cute?!).  It's part of the Red Puppy Appeal which is for the Guide Dogs here in New Zealand.  I got it at Bayleys for a $5 donation. Look at how cute the puppies are... and of course you can always decorate them with royal icing.  But they taste just as good as they are. :) 

The basic recipe for shortbread is very easy.  It is a 1-2-3 ratio of sugar-butter-flour.  The flour is a mix of plain and corn flour.  Cornflour makes for a crisper cookie.  Then you can get creative and add other things if you like.  I added some chocolate chips to half the batch.  You can add nuts or dried fruit too if you prefer.  You can also leave them plain and dip them in melted chocolate.  Mmmm!

Recipe for shortbread cookies

100g caster sugar
200g unsalted butter, softened
260g plain flour
40g corn flour
pinch of salt

1. Beat the butter until creamy.  Add the sugar and beat again until mixture is light and fluffy.
2. Sift the flour, cornflour and salt together and add into butter mixture.  Add chocolate chips, nuts or dried fruit, if using.  Combine gently together using your hands to form a dough.  Roll into a ball, flatten and wrap in cling film.  Chill for about 20 minutes or until firm.  Alternatively, if you want to cut them into rounds, you can roll the dough into a log, wrap in cling wrap and chill.
3. Preheat oven to 170 degree C.  Roll out the chilled dough to about 1 cm.  Cut shapes and place on lined baking sheet.  I like to chill the shapes for about 5 minutes before baking them to make sure they keep their shape.  Alternatively, if you have rolled the dough into a log, slice to form rounds.  
4. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until firm.  
5. Cool for a few minutes to firm up on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to completely cool down.  You can dip them in melted chocolate at this point or eat them as they are.  

For a Valentine's gift, cut heart shape cookies and bake.  You can also make cookie pops by inserting a cookie stick into each cookie before baking and decorate with some fun Valentine messages or the name of your loved ones.  See my post here on what they look like.

Enjoy! :)

Christmas cake and cookies gift

It's been so long since I have blogged I can't believe it's March already!  Our computer decided to have a meltdown at the end of last year and so I haven't been able to put up any pictures of what I've been up to. 
Well I decided to switch it on again today and lo and behold it is up and running again!  Maybe it just needed a holiday too!

Well this post is either very late or very early but I thought I should post some pictures of a Christmas cake and cookie tree stack I did.  The cake is fruit cake and the cookies are lemon based shortbread.

The fondant striped bow was really easy and fun to do and I really must put together a simple tutorial on it soon.  Fingers crossed the computer works next time I start it up!  But just in case, here is a quick run down on how I did the stripes.

Roll a sheet of white fondant as your base.  Then overlap with strips of red at even intervals.  Gently roll over the strips with your rolling pin so the red fondant merges with the white.  Cut out strips for your bow and ribbon and you have your striped ribbon.  I used a new set of cutters from Patchwork for the letters.   A bit fiddly but I am sure I will get the hang of it soon.  I then painted the letters with edible gold paint.

The cookie stack was a lot of fun to do.  I baked lots of star shaped cookies in various sizes using the Wilton star cookie cutter set, decorated them with royal icing and silver dragees and then stacked them together, criss crossing the cookies along the way to get the effect you see in the picture below. 

Very effective don't you think?  It would look really nice in green too of course.  You could even pipe little icicles on the edges of each cookie to make it look like snow.

Thanks for looking!

Monica

Wedding tier cookie and ribbon rose {Tutorial}

I bought some cookie cutters recently and one of them was this multi-tier cake cutter.  I thought it would be perfect as a wedding cookie - but boy, did it take a lot of work just to decorate one so here is my one and only cookie.  Next time, when I have a little more time and patience, I will come up with some other designs.  Another excuse to bake! :)

The blue flowers were made with the smallest flower cutter I had.  I topped the centres of the flowers with some small silver cachous.  The pleats for the fondant were a pain to make so I think I have to figure out how to make them a little neater hmmm.  The rose petals falling over the cake were made by flattening small balls of fondant until they were very thin and then scraping them off the mat carefully with a sharp knife.  They end up curling like loose petals when you do that.

The ribbon roses are very easy to make and I remembered to take some photos of the steps.  So here goes, my first tutorial on how to make a simple ribbon rose.


Step 1:
Roll a ball of fondant in the colour you want into a log.  Then flatten the log into a strip.  It doesn't have to be an even width strip, what's more important is that the strip of fondant is as thin as you can roll it without tearing it when you pick it up. 

Start by curling one end of the fondant strip like this:  (I would use my fingers to pick up the strip and curl it but for the sake of trying to take a photo, I had to lay it on the mat.)

Step 2:
As you curl the fondant with your fingers, add some pleats or bigger folds to it to make it look like the rose petals are opening.

Once again, I would actually be holding the fondant strip and curling it with my fingers but it was rather hard doing that whilst taking the photo so here it is on the mat again. 


Step 3:
Keep curling the fondant around, adding more folds and pleats, until you get the size you want.

Step 4:
Once you're happy with the shape of your rose, pinch and twist the bottom part (the stalk) and carefully cut off the extra fondant.  You should have your first ribbon rose.  :)

Voila!  My first tutorial is complete, and so is your ribbon rose.  That wasn't too bad was it?  Hope this was as helpful for you as it was fun for me to do! :)

If you found this tutorial useful, I would appreciate some comments on it.  Thanks!

Fashionable cookies

Happy new year!  I can't believe it's the start of a new year already.  I hope all of you had a good start to 2011!  I was busy with friends over the holidays and did not have time to bake!  So I'm back now with some fashionable cookies to start off the new year.  I recently bought some cookie cutters and one of them was this high heel cutter.

I also bought these stamps which are Holly Products and they are from Set 10 - Flower embroidery.  I used some of these for my fondant designs on the shoes.

They're really easy and fun to work with and you can come up with endless designs.  Here are a few I made:

I also used a stitching tool from PME to outline the stitches for the shoe. Very cool and easy to use!

I overlaid black fondant for the buckle and heel to give it some contrast.  Add a few silver cachous for some bling. :)

Here's another design using one of the stamps I showed you.  I ruffled a black strip of fondant with a toothpick and then folded it up and pinched the corner to get my ruffle.  Add a silver cachous for bling.

I started of this one using one of the stamps and didn't quite liked the design so I just kept stamping over it over and over to get this effect.  Gives it a different type of texture I think.  :)

And finally, I made the rose with a long thin strip of blue fondant, and just curled it around to give it the rose effect.  Lots of fun to do and am really pleased with my new stamps and stitching tool.  :)

What type of baking have you been up to for the start of the year?  I would love to hear from you! :)

Happy baking!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Valentine pops

My sister's friend wanted some Valentine cookies to give away to her friends so I decided to make some cookie pops.  I used a simple shortbread recipe I got from the Net and I learned how to make cookie pops from this fabulous website called Cake Journal.  There are also tutorials on this website that show you how to flood the cookies with royal icing and I tried it out.  Very simple and easy to do! (Thank you Louise!)  I used royal icing flowers I learned from Course 2 to top each cookie and voila!