I woke up this morning to an icy winter wonderland. I figured what better way to warm up both myself and my house than to turn on the oven and bake! Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so that provided the perfect theme for a batch of tasty treats. Because the roads were iced over, I was limited to ingredients I had on hand in my pantry.
I found a good recipe for sugar cookies on joyofbaking.com that I could make with the ingredients I already had. I'd planned on baking sugar cookies and icing them with royal icing. However, after 30 minutes of cleaning out all my cabinets and looking through every item in my pantry, I discovered that my meringue powder had disappeared! I suppose I could have attempted to make the icing with egg whites, but I've tried that before and wasn't happy with the drippy, messy outcome. The meringue powder works much better for me.
So, out of necessity, I came up with plan B. I tinted the cookie dough with red food coloring and used red sprinkles on top. Still very cute and Valentine's appropriate! I'm out of vanilla extract (thanks to all the baking I've done lately) so I decided to substitute mint instead. I had to use liquid food coloring because I don't have any red gel color (yet!) so I cut back on the extract a little to compensate for the added liquid.
I've had some trouble with using cookie cutters in the past, but I'd done some studying, and this time I had a lot more success. Rolling the dough a little thicker and coating both my cookie cutter and my cookie-moving spatula with generous amounts of flour were the key. Refrigerating the dough for an hour before rolling it out also helped.
I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially since these were a spur-of-the-moment idea. I think they would taste a little sweeter if I'd had the vanilla, but the mint leaves a nice, fresh taste in my mouth. (Bryan helped with the official taste test and gave his seal of approval.) Most importantly, I feel more festive for the upcoming holiday, and I cured my "itch to bake", at least for now.
2 comments:
they look great! never would have thought to add mint!
Honestly, I looked in the cabinet and saw that I had almond, orange, and mint extract. I sure wasn't going out in the ice to get vanilla! I was afraid the almond would be too strong, and the orange wasn't quite right, so mint it was!
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