I started with this idea when my husband and I decided to host a superbowl party. My friends are not huge football fans, but they are HUGE food fans. I knew they'd appreciate a grand cookie gesture from me. I decided on footballs and helmets for this batch. The problem was, I don't have a cookie cutter in either of these shapes. I didn't want to go out and buy new ones, so I had to come up with something. A trustee google search later, and I found the answer. A way to "cut cookies in any customizable shape, without using a cookie cutter." I took a piece of cardboard (about the thickness of a cereal box) and drew and cut out a football and a helmet. I just made my sugar cookie dough as usual, rolled it out, and placed each cut-out on top of the dough. Using a sharp kitchen knife, I carefully outlined the outside of the cardboard cut-out. Voila, I had helmet and football cookie shapes. Then I just transferred it to the tray as usual. So easy, I can't believe I never thought of it before! And by the way, I accidentally doubled the batch of sugar cookie dough, so I wound up with almost 50 cookies! I knew the next part of my job would be tough, but I was ready to tackle it.... so I thought. First I made a chocolate icing for the footballs (made of egg whites, confectioner's sugar, and cocoa) and a blue icing (made of the same recipe I used in the previous post). I spread them on the cookies and let it dry overnight. I made a lot less icing than I had anticipated (probably because of all the extra cookies), so I had to run to the store to buy some more ingredients to make more. (Just an aside, I had spoken with a friend this week who told me that I used too many ingredients in the sugar cookie icing... and that I should just use egg whites and confectioner's sugar). So when I was at the store, I decided that instead of buying a lot of ingredients, I'd just pick up some confectioner's sugar and egg beaters and try it her way. Problem was, I didn't know how much of each item to use. I thought to myself that it was only 2 ingredients and that I would just mix them together....
Looking back, this was probably my first mistake. I mixed up the icing until I thought the consistency looked right. I started decorating the tops of my cookies, and was having a ridiculous amount of trouble getting the icing out of the tube. My hand was hurting, the icing was glopping, I was getting really frustrated. Like, REALLY frustrated. I thought I had the wrong kind of dispenser, the wrong kind of tips.... I must have ruined at least 10 cookies before realized that the icing needed to be thinner. At this point, I miiiiight have made the false claim that this was my last time baking, and that I was quitting.... so I'm sorry to my husband for freaking out on him. I'm not going to put an actual picture of what I looked like, but it was somewhat like this:
Anyway, I took a break, and when I got back to work, I finally realized that I should thin out the icing. I added more egg white beater and a little water to the icing, and I was finally able to decorate the cookies the way I wanted to. The icing was a little thin at this point, but hey, at least it was coming out of the tube. So, did all that freaking out pay off? Well no, I shouldn't have gotten so upset about baking cookies.... but.... the cookies came out great, I think. Thank goodness I had so many extra cookies to practice with. I'm not going to post the bad ones... but here's how the majority came out.
