Nautical Cookies

Hey guys!!! Long time no talk. It was a busy and dizzy week!
The weather has been sunny and very warm in Rhode Island. Trust me I’m not complaining. I’ll take the sun over rain any day.  So while it was warm and toasty outside my kitchen was baking some seashell & starfish cookies for a wedding shower order. A friend Amy is getting married and her mom and sister ordered nautical cookies. They wanted the seashell & starfish sugar cookies decorated with white and blue. Apparently nautical theme is a big hit this year with weddings! It’s a great honor to be able to make things for a friends special day. It’s also wonderful that I can attend and share the day with her.  Amy’s a wonderful person, one of the nicest people you could ever meet, and her family is just as nice and FUNNY! I cannot wait for the wedding, it should be a hoot of a night!

Of course I run into a snafu. DRAMA of my life and kitchen. The recipe I used for my friends Steph’s baptism cookies was driving me nuts. I made 4 batches of cookie dough, overnighted the recipe. Rolled, cut, froze then baked and about 3/4′s of the cookies spread. Starfish looked like flowers, some of the seashells looked like they were on steroids.  I made one more batch but omitted the baking powder and they did turn out better but was still too crunchy for my liking.  (side note: brought them into work today and everyone thought I was nuts!?!  They looked and tasted fine.  I probably stressed the living crap outta myself for perfection, but that’s okay, I do like Cookie Crafts recipe better and 99.9% of them even after the dough was rolled more than once didn’t really spread)

A few days later I grabbed a book from the library called

Cookies are decorated with royal icing, white and blue. I alternated the colors on some of the cookies so they wouldn’t all look the same. And added some luster dust to give them a shimmer. I tried the luster dust with vodka but it just kept clumping up, so I used it dry and was happier with the results. My piping is getting better as I haven’t made many decorative cookies but it does a tune on my carpal tunnel! Oh well. The bride and her family were happy, so that is all that counted!

Here’s the recipe to the sugar cookies.

Sugar Cookies
by Cookie Craft
makes about:
(30) 2 ½” cookies
(16) 3 ½” cookies
(12) 4 ½” cookies

3 cups of all-purpose flour
½ tsp salt; I may try ¼ tsp next time
1 cup unsalted butter; softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla extract; I used vanilla paste
2 baking sheets
Parchment paper

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.  Set aside.

Whisk flour and salt in a medium bowl; set aside.

Cream butter & sugar until light and fluffy.  Stopping occasionally to scrape the sides & bottom.

Add egg and vanilla until completely mixed.  Stop and scrape the sides & bottom.

Slowly add the flour mixture to your mixer on low.  Add until all flour is incorporated.

Form 2 balls and place on each lined cookie sheet.  Cover each ball with a piece of parchment paper and flatten with hands into a disc.

Roll dough into ¼” thickness.

Place stacked cookie sheets in the refrigerator to chill for 20-30 minutes until dough is chilled.

Preheat oven in the mean time to 350.

Using your cookie cutters cut cookies out into shapes.  Place shapes onto jelly roll pan or you can use the same pan just remove the excess dough and leave about 2″ in between each cookie.

Bake for 5 minutes, rotate pan then bake for 5-6 minutes until light golden around the edges.  I used my convection bake and 10-11 minutes was perfect as I didn’t want the brown to that noticeable but baked not raw.  Recipe in book states 12-16 minutes.

Let the cookies rest on pan for about 3 minutes.  Remove cookies to wire rack to finish cooling.

Keep rolling, cutting baking until all the dough is done or close enough, as I didn’t want to roll the dough too many times and getting hard cookies.

Decorated cooled cookies with royal icing or whatever else you would like.

I really did like the luster dust and cannot wait to use it again.  It wasn’t that noticeable but when people did see it shimmer or hear other people say “Oh there’s glitter on it” people looked for it and liked it.

Now don’t even get me started on bagging the cookies as the bags that I originally purchased didn’t fit all the cookies, so had to drive half hour or so out to get a bigger size. See kitchen DRAMA!  But because of the bag issue I found some thank you tags, I just wished that they cut them out for me as it didn’t help the carpal tunnel.  So Dyanne Sweet Tooth if your reading this (highly doubt it) could you have them precut? Pretty please?

Hopefully more showers and weddings orders are in the future.  I know none of them will be mine.  Baby factory is closed and hubby hasn’t complained yet of my habits hobbies throughout the years so I think it’s all good!

 **9/3/11 Cannot believe I forgot to add the sugar in the recipe.. sorry guys!**