Christmas Cookies

The recipe for these cute Christmas cookies comes from the latest Donna Hay magazine (Issue 24, Dec / Jan 2011).  I tried making them the other day because I’ve never actually had a go at icing biscuits before.

In the magazine they used a 8cm circle cookie cutter and they claim it makes 25 cookies.  I used some standard Christmas cookie cutters I picked up from Steven’s and I had more than 25 cookies, and that is with burning about half the mixture – they take around 8 minutes to bake and I kept forgetting about them :P
I also didn’t use a piping bag to ice them as the recipe states, I used my new icing set – made things easy peasy.  Here’s the recipe:

 
250g butter, softened
¾ cup caster sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg yolk
2 ¼ cups plain flour, sifted
2 ½ cups icing sugar, sifted
red food colouring

Preheat oven to 180˚C.  Place butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until pale and creamy.  Add the vanilla and egg yolk and beat well to combine.  Add the flour and beat until a smooth dough forms.  Divide the dough into four portions, wrap in plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 15 minutes or until firm.
Roll the dough out between 2 sheets of non-stick baking paper to 5mm thick.  Cut out your desired shapes from the dough and place on a tray lined with non-stick baking paper (I found that once rolling the dough out it became to soft – maybe because it has been insanely humid here, so I put the dough back into the fridge for a few minutes before cutting it).  Bake for 8 minutes or until lightly golden (not brown!).  Cool on a wire rack.

 
Place 1¾ cups icing sugar in a bowl with 2½ tablespoons of boiling water and mix until smooth.  Set aside.  Place the remaining icing sugar, 2 tablespoons of boiling water and a few drops of food colouring in a separate bowl and mix until combined.  Spread the cookies with the plain icing.  Allow to set.  Place the red icing into a piping bag and pipe lines onto the cookies.