I love baking at Easter. I like to have a peek through my stash of old food magazines from Spring seasons gone by. I relish the food
styling and use of spring colours in their Easter baking recipes. So much so, that I want to bake most of their recipes within the week. The reality of life then kicks in and I’m lucky if I have time to bake a couple of them.

I digress… So I settled on baking ‘Easter Sugar Cookies’.  I found the recipe by Harry Eastwood, in last year’s Waitrose Kitchen magazine.

I didn’t have any nutmeg or ginger in the cupboard, so I added a little more mixed spice and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. I also used salted butter and left out the teaspoon of salt.

For the royal icing I used a scaled -down recipe from Sweetopia:  the queen of royal icing and cookie decorating.

The baked (undecorated) cookies have a delicate, buttery taste, similar to shortbread, but not as dense. The cinnamon and mixed spice flavour then emerges. Once decorated, the sweetness of the icing slightly overpowered the cookie, ( I admit I piped an considerable layer icing on the cookies).

If I made these again I would certainly add the additional spices as stated in the recipe below, and I would decorate a thin layer of icing on top.

Overall these are delicious as an afternoon treat, washed down with a large mug of tea, enjoy!

Recipe

(makes about 30 small cookies)

200g unsalted butter ( room temperature)

200g caster sugar

1 tsp salt

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

370g plain flour, plus some extra for dusting

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp mixed spice

1 tsp ground ginger

 

Royal Icing (scaled down via Sweetopia)

2 ½ tbsp meringue powder

3 oz warm water

½ tsp cream of tartar

500g icing sugar

Method

Beat the butter, sugar and salt with an electric or standing mixer until pale and thick.

Beat in the egg and vanilla extract.

Add the flour, baking powder and spices in 3 or 4 additions, mixing well in between.

Once the dough comes together, knead lightly into a ball.

Cover with clingfilm and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180C, gas mark 4. Split the dough into four pieces and on a lightly dusted surface, roll out each piece to a ½ cm
thickness.

Cut out your shapes using cookie cutters.

Transfer to a baking sheet lined with baking parchment and cook for 9-10 minutes, until lightly golden, then cool them on a wire rack.

Roll and cut out the next batch while the other batch bakes, repeat until the dough has been used.

Whilst the cookies cool, make the icing.

Add the meringue powder and warm water together in a mixer and mix for at least 30 seconds.

Then add the cream of tartar, followed by the icing sugar.

Mix on a slow speed for 10 minutes until thick and glossy.

To thin the icing add drops of water.

Use Sweetopia’s rule of thumb for icing consistency which is her “10 second rule“:

Drag a knife through the surface of your royal icing and count to 10. If the icing surface becomes smooth in anywhere between 5-10 seconds, then your icing is ready to use. If it takes longer than approximately 10 seconds, the icing is too thick. Slowly add more water. If your icing surface smoothes over in less than 5-10 seconds, it is too runny. Mix your icing longer or slowly add more sifted icing sugar to thicken it.

Once you have the correct consistency, split the icing into 3 or 4 bowls and colour each icing batch with different colours using colour gels.

Fill into piping bags and ice your cookies once they have completely cooled down.

Let the icing dry before serving (I found they dried completely overnight).

Enjoy!

 

 

Tags: Cookies, Easter;, Royal icing, Sweet treat;

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2012 at 8:37 am and is filed under Baking Recipes, Easter, Sweet Treats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.