Silver Bell Sugar Cookies #CreativeCookieExchange

A great sugar cookie recipe that actually keeps its shape when baked. Mix up your sparkling sugar decorations using both crystal white and silver to make your silver bell sugar cookies really shine. And don't forget the silver dragées for the clappers.

If you look back through my recipe archives, there is not a single cookie that’s been rolled and cut out with a cookie cutter to be baked and decorated. Not one. And in last five and half years I have shared 53 cookie recipes. I just counted.

When my girls lived at home, baking sugar cookies was a fun activity year-round but we really got into them – and making gingerbread men to decorate - just before Christmas. A couple of summers ago, I invited my small nieces over for a sugar cookie baking/decorating session where as many sprinkles were consumed directly as were put on cookies. But we had a lot of fun!

And since they didn't care about anyone else's idea of perfection, their cookies were fabulous and creative and beautiful.

Tip: For children (or adults who need more encouragement), fill squeezy bottles with the royal icing. They are much easier to handle than piping bags.

I’ve finally figured out that what I mind about making these things is not the time or the patience they require but the lack of company in my kitchen. So here’s my recommendation to you. Put on the holiday tunes. Mix up a batch (or two) and invite some friends or family over to decorate with you. Of course, you don’t have to make silver bell sugar cookies. Use your own favorite cookie cutters and colored sprinkles. And while this is a great time of the year to get together, sugar cookie baking sessions can be fun all year round.

Ingredients for about 40 small cookies
For the cookies:
1/2 cup or 113g unsalted butter, slightly softened to room temperature
1/2 cup or 100g granulated sugar
White of large egg, at room temperature (about 40g)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups or 218g all-purpose flour, plus a bit more if needed for rolling
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

For the royal icing:
1 1/4 cups or 156g powdered sugar + more as needed
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
pinch salt
1 egg white (about 40g)

Important: Uncooked egg whites should not be served to anyone with a compromised immune system, unless those whites are from pasteurized eggs. Substitute an equivalent combination of powdered egg whites and water, according to the package instructions.

For decorating:
Assorted sprinkles
Silver dragées for the bell clapper, if desired

Method
In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, soften the butter by beating it for a minute or so. Add in the sugar and beat until light and fluffy, scraping down the bowl occasionally, as needed.

Add in the egg white and vanilla and beat again until they are fully incorporated.

Add in the flour a bit at a time until it is completely mixed in and you have a soft dough that is firm enough to roll out.

Divide the dough into two pieces and roll them each out on parchment paper until they are about 1/4 in or 1/2 cm thick. Sprinkle on a tiny bit more flour if you must to keep the dough from sticking to your rolling pin. Cover with cling film and refrigerate for at least one hour or until ready to bake.

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C.

Line your baking sheets with more parchment or silicon liners. If they are well chilled you can put these cookies fairly close together as they should not spread or puff very much. Well-chilled is key. 

Remove one rolled dough circle from the refrigerator and cut out your cookies with a cookie cutter. Use a flat spatula to transfer them quickly to the prepared cookie sheet.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 8-10 minutes or until the edges are just beginning to brown.

Remove and leave to cool completely before decorating. Continue the process until all the dough has been cut out and baked.

NOTE: Always add newly cut cookies to a cool lined cookie sheet before baking. Putting them on a hot pan will cause the butter to melt out prematurely. Having two or three pans to rotate is helpful.

Once the cookies are completely cooled, make the royal icing. Sift the powdered sugar, cream of tartar and pinch of salt into a mixing bowl.

Add in the egg white (see important note above) and whisk it in a little at a time from the middle, until all is incorporated.

Partially mixed in. Just keep whisking from the sides until all is incorporated.

Check the consistency of the icing by lifting your whisk and allowing it to drip back into the bowl. Too runny? Add more powdered sugar. Too firm? Add a drop or two of water. You want to be able to pipe it but have it keep its shape.

Spoon some of the icing into your piping bag fitted with a #3 tip. Pipe a royal icing outline of the cookie and pop on a silver dragée for the clapper, if using.

Outline all of the cookies and leave the royal icing to harden before you move on to the next step.

Cover the royal icing bowl with a piece of damp paper towel, then cling film and refrigerate. When the outlines are hard, remove the royal icing from the refrigerator so it can warm up a bit, and stir to loosen up.

Set up your decorating station putting one small saucer for each color of sprinkle or decoration you are using. This will allow you to reunite the sprinkles that fall off with their similarly colored brethren when all this is over.

Put the cookie in the first saucer and use a spoon to add a puddle of royal icing into the middle of the cookie. Spread it around right up to the hard outlines with a toothpick or even a clean paintbrush.

Add some sprinkles. Shake the cookie so loose sprinkles fall back in the saucer.

Move the cookie to the second saucer and add the next color sprinkles. Shake the cookie so loose sprinkles fall back in that saucer.

And so on.

Place finished cookies in a safe place where they can dry until completely hardened before trying to stack, package or transport them.

Enjoy!

This month my Creative Cookie Exchange group is sharing decorated cookies, perfect for the holidays or whatever you feel like celebrating!

• Black and White Cookies from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Chemistry Cookies from Upstate Ramblings
• Emoji Cookies from Flours and Frostings
• Hawaiian Reindeer Cookies from All That's Left Are The Crumbs
• Henna Cookies from Spiceroots
• Silver Bell Sugar Cookies from Food Lust People Love
• Stamped Lime Meltaways from The Spiced Life
• Stars and Stripes Cookies from A Baker's House
• White Chocolate Peppermint Kiss Cookies from 2 Cookin' Mamas

Creative Cookie Exchange is hosted by Laura of The Spiced Life. We get together once a month to bake cookies with a common theme or ingredient so Creative Cookie Exchange is a great resource for cookie recipes. Be sure to check out our Pinterest Board and our monthly posts at The Spiced Life. We post the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!

Pin it! 

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Gingham Picnic Cookies #CreativeCookieExchange

Perfect for a picnic-themed party or for taking on a picnic, these festive vanilla sugar cookies are decorated with royal icing and coconut and are actually quite easy to make, though the process takes time. My step-by-step photos show you how.

Back in the years of small children and birthday parties, we lived in places that either didn’t understand children’s birthday cakes as Disney-enthralled children imagine them or there simply weren't bakeries that could produce cakes like we wanted. So my girlfriends and I always made the cakes. Esmeralda from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, 101 Dalmatians, The Little Mermaid, a standup Barbie doll in a ball gown, just to name a few. Whatever my girls wanted, they got. One year our elder daughter wanted a picnic themed party so I baked a rectangular cake and decorated it green, like grass and topped the whole thing with a picnic scene, complete with gingham picnic blanket and tiny picnic fare. Instead of actually writing this post, I just spent way too much time looking for a photo of that cake and sadly managed to turn up one where we were only starting to decorate.

That's the birthday girl supervising and my chief partner in crime for all things crafty,
my friend Jacky, wielding the ruler. See my decorating tool box? This was serious business, folks!

This was in the days before digital cameras and I must confess that my system of organizing photos lacked, shall we say, a system. Or organization. Can anybody relate?

Nonetheless, that cake was the inspiration for these cookies because our theme for this month’s Creative Cookie Exchange is Pack for a Picnic Cookies. Now possibly The Spiced Life doyenne, Laura, our illustrious leader and chooser of themes, meant only cookies you could take on a picnic and in that these would also qualify. But picnic cookies meant a walk down memory lane for me with gingham and grass. And ants. Possibly the random caterpillar. Bugs aside, it felt good to go there.

As I mention in the first paragraph, these are not hard to make, but they do take time. Most of it is hands-off chilling in the fridge time though so don’t let that scare you off.

Ingredients
For the cookie dough:
1 cup or 227g unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup or 100g sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups or 315g flour
Red food coloring gel. Or your preferred color for gingham.

N.B. I use Wilton’s no taste red gel. <Amazon affiliate link. Liquid colorings add too much moisture to the dough so it’s best to avoid them. The amount depends on how dark you’d like your dough. Do keep in mind that the dough will darken as it chills.

For the grass border:
Royal icing (see recipe below)
1 cup or 85g sweetened flake coconut
Green food coloring (I used Wilton’s leaf green gel. <affiliate link) The amount depends on how dark you’d like your grass.

For the royal icing:
1 1/2 cups or 190g icing sugar
1 egg white or 2 1/4 teaspoons pasteurized egg whites or egg white substitute
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
Optional: green food coloring (Coloring means it hides better under the grass.)

For ants or caterpillars:
Semi-sweet chocolate
Mini M&Ms

Method
Cream the butter and sugar with your electric mixer until fluffy and pale yellow. Add the vanilla extract and beat again.

Sift your flour and salt into the bowl gradually, beating well between additions and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula occasionally.

Turn half of the dough out onto a clean work surface and knead a couple of minutes. Shape it into a rough rectangle and wrap it in cling film and refrigerate.

Add red or other food coloring to the other half of the dough still in your mixer. Mix on low until the dough is a nice homogeneous color. If the color is to your liking, form the dough into a rough rectangle, wrap it in cling film and refrigerate it.

The two doughs before the first chill. 

Once the dough is firm enough to hold its shape well, use a folded plastic bag and a rolling pin to shape it into two more precise rectangles, tucking each into a corner of each bag and folding the sides over to keep the dough in when you roll it flat and even.

After the first chill and shaped into straighter rectangles. You can see how much darker that red has gotten.

Chill again for at least one hour.

Remove the rectangles of dough from the bags and trim any uneven edges. Cut each into strips as wide as the rectangles are thick. The goal is very long rectangular blocks as wide as they are tall. For you teachers and parents out there, think Cuisenaire rods.

On top of a piece of cling film, start assembling your gingham cookies by alternating white blocks with red blocks and building upwards to create a 3x3 block or 4x4 block pattern. Lightly press the blocks together as you stack them. I was able to make one with a 4x4 block pattern and one with a 3x3 block pattern and only had one long block left over.

This step is important. See how loosely the pieces are attached in the photo above, despite being pressed into place as each was added? We are going to fix that! Wrap the stacked blocks tightly in cling film then lightly tap them on your work surface so the blocks are pushed uniformly together, creating a square “log” of sorts. Do this on every side and then do the ends as well. Refrigerate for another 30 minutes or until you are ready to bake the cookies.

Meanwhile, you can make the royal icing and color the coconut.

To make the royal icing, use the whisk attachment of your stand mixer to beat the egg white and lemon juice until just a little foamy.

Sift in the powdered sugar and salt gradually. Continue mixing until the sugar is completely incorporated. Add some green food coloring at this point, if using, and mix well.

Keep it covered with cling film until ready to use or the royal icing will harden up.

To color the coconut, add it to a Ziploc bag along with a good 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon of gel coloring. Shake and knead the bag until the coloring is more or less uniformly dispersed in the coconut. This will keep in the freezer for ages if you end up not using it all.

When you are ready to bake the cookies, preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a baking sheet with a silicone mat or baking parchment.

Unwrap one of your gingham “logs” and cut off the uneven ends. Now cut the logs into slices as wide as each square on the end.

Bake in your preheated oven for about 1-12 minutes or until the edges are just starting to brown.

Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack. Continue until all the cookies are baked or freeze the balance of the dough, rolled tightly in cling film.

When the cookies are completely cool, fill a small plate with your colored coconut and pipe or spread royal icing on one side of each cookie.

Dip that side in the green coconut immediately and press down just a little so the coconut sticks.

And voilà! Now do the other sides.

Place back on your cooled silicone mat or baking parchment and leave till the royal icing sets. If you are in a hot climate like I am, you can pop these in the refrigerator to speed it up.

To make the ants, microwave some chocolate until it's just melted but not hot. It doesn’t take but a few squares for a few ants so use your judgment. Use a piping bag with a small tip to dot the cookies with ant-like shapes. Use dots of chocolate to hold down mini M&Ms and to make caterpillars with tiny legs.

Enjoy!

This first batch was from the 4x4 cookies. Sadly, I didn't take any photos of the 3x3. 

Here's our wonderful list of 14 picnic cookies this month:

• Blondies from A Baker's House
• Browned Butter Lemon Cookies with Macadamia Nuts from The Spiced Life
• Cashew Butter Bites from Magnolia Days
• Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies from Noshing With The Nolands
• Chocolate Chip Cookies from SimplyVeggies
• Chocolate Chip Potato Chip Cookies from Our Good Life
• Demerara Shortbread Cookies from Karen’s Kitchen Stories
• Gingham Picnic Cookies from Food Lust People Love
• Gluten-Free Trail Mix Cookies from Rhubarb and Honey
• Key Lime Coolers from 2 Cookin’ Mamas
• Naan Khatai - Indian Shortbread Cookies from Spice Roots
• Nutella Energy Bites from Study at Home Mama
• Raisin Biscuit Cookies from A Shaggy Dough Story
• Soft Brown Sugar Cookies from Hezzi-D's Books and Cooks

If you are a blogger and want to join in the fun, contact Laura at thespicedlife AT gmail DOT com and she will get you added to our Facebook group, where we discuss our cookies and share links.

You can also just use us as a great resource for cookie recipes--be sure to check out our Pinterest Board and our monthly posts (you can find all of them at The Spiced Life). You will be able to find them the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!

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Hibiscus Sugar Cookies with Hibiscus Syrup #CreativeCookieExchange

Dried hibiscus flowers have long been used to make tea or, more technically correct, a tisane, which is sipped hot or cold. The tart beverage is said to lower blood pressure and to have antioxidants a plenty. I’m here to tell you that hibiscus petals also make some pretty tasty sugar cookies and a divine flavored syrup.

In my current part of the world, hibiscus tisane (“tea” made from flowers) is a thing. Iranians call it sour tea and they aren’t kidding. The dried petals are available in the bulk section of my local supermarket, along with the spices, dried pulses, marinated olives and chunks of local cheese. Sometimes I just wander over to that area to inhale the fragrances but, often, I am seduced into making a purchase. Who can resist?

This is an immense oval with spices and other goodies on all sides - Carrefour Hypermarket, Mirdiff City Centre

When our Creative Cookie Exchange host, Laura from The Spiced Life, posted this month’s theme – Flowers – I practically clapped my hands with glee. After my week of baking with tea back in March, when I was visiting my friend who owns a tea shop in Michigan, I knew hibiscus cookies were not only possible, but that they would be delicious.

Ingredients
For about 32-36 cookies:
1/2 cup or 16g dried hibiscus
1 cup or 225g unsalted butter
1/2 cup or 100g sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon Cognac (or sub orange juice if you don’t do alcohol)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups or 280g flour

For the syrup:
1/4 cup or 8g hibiscus
1/2 cup or 100g sugar
Pinch salt
1/4 cup or 60ml water

Method
Pulse the hibiscus petals in a food processor until they are in small pieces, stopping before you create complete hibiscus dust. There will be some pink dust but that’s okay.

With a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat together butter and sugar until fluffy and light.

Add in the eggs, Cognac, salt, vanilla, flour and hibiscus petals and mix until a soft dough forms.

Wrap dough in plastic wrap. Let rest at least one hour in the refrigerator.

Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C and prepare your baking pan by lining it with parchment paper.

Cut off small chunks of dough and roll them between your hand.

Space them out two inches or four centimeters apart on the prepared pan. Press them gently into circles with your palm.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until light gold at the edges. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Meanwhile, to make the syrup, put all the ingredients except the butter into a small pot and bring it to the boil.

The color starts to seep out, even before I've turned the stove on!

Turn the pot down and let it bubble away gently until the liquid is reduced by almost half. The color should be a gorgeous fuchsia. (By the way, as a complete aside, hibiscus water is a great natural coloring to dye white eggs for Easter.)

Strain the syrup into a small bowl.

Add the butter. Stir until it’s melted.

Spread the candied petals out on parchment paper, pulling them apart so they can dry a little. They are going to be very sticky. I have to tell you that I couldn’t pass by the parchment without pinching one and eating it. They are sour and sweet and definitely more-ish. If they don’t appeal to you, you don’t have to save them but do give them a try.

When the cookies are completely cool, drizzle a little syrup over each.

Top with the candied petals, if desired.

Enjoy!

                                                       

If all the spring showers have put you in the flower mood, you are going to love all the cookies the group has baked this month!

• Orange Blossom Honey Madeleines from All That's Left Are The Crumbs
• Flower Cookies from A Baker's House
• Rose-Lemon Meltaways from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Lebanese Orange Blossom Water and Pistachio Cookies from The Spiced Life
• Lemon Persian Rose Shortbread from Noshing with the Nolands
• Lavender Poppy Seed Shortbread from Magnolia Days
• Hibiscus Sugar Cookies from Food Lust People Love

If you would like to join us for future Creative Cookie Exchange challenges, just contact Laura at thespicedlife AT gmail DOT com and she will get you added to our Facebook group, where we discuss our cookies and share links.

You can also use us as a great resource for cookie recipes--be sure to check out our Pinterest Board, and our monthly posts. You will be able to find them the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month!