tasty tuesday: tetris cookies

I have done a lot of cool things with sugar cookies over the years, but I have to say I think this project takes the cake... er, takes the cookie?

This cookie project was inspired by a post by Sweet Explorations.  I thought that it was so cute!
I showed it to my good friend Ashley, and she got really excited about it too.  Her boyfriend, Karson, loves Tetris.  His work even has an old Tetris arcade game!  Ashley thought this would be a creative way to express her love for Karson on Valentine's Day.
So we got together and made these funky treats, and she took them into his work on V Day!

Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Butter

3/4 cup Sugar

2 tsp Vanilla

1 Egg

1 TBSP Milk (or cream)

2 cup Flour

1 tsp Baking Powder

Directions:

1) Cream butter - add sugar, vanilla, egg and milk; beat hard.

2) Add flour and baking powder to cream mixture and beat again. 

3) Roll onto flour board and cut into shapes.

4) Bake at 350 degrees F for 5-6 minutes.

Royal Icing
Ingredients:
3 egg white
Icing Sugar (approximately 3 cups)

Directions:

1)  Mix in icing sugar with your egg white until the desired consistency has been reached. (you can see a photo below, I made mine pretty thick, so it wouldn't fall off the edges of the cookies!)

2)  Just add a (very small!) amount of water to adjust the thickness (if needed).

3)  Keep covered until you're using it or else it will start to harden!

We doubled the cookie recipe, and rolled out all the dough at once.  We then used card stock paper templates that Ashley made, and cut out the cookies with knives. (As you can see below.)

 

 I was surprised at how much fun it was to make these cookies.  Sugar cookies always seem like a good idea, and then take about 10 years longer to make than you had anticipated.  While these guys were a bit time consuming, we had such a good time making them, that time flew by!

Everything about them screamed Tetris!  Cutting them out we had to figure out which shapes would go where in order to be most efficient with our dough.  Organizing them on the pan was also like a crazy game of Tetris.  Even putting them in container or on serving plates was like a real like 3D game of Tetris.

Kelsey likes to outline her sugar cookies with royal icing, let them dry, and then fill in the center with royal icing that has been watered down a bit.

For this recipe I used thicker royal icing, and didn't bother outlining them.  There were so many colours, so I knew it wouldn't be realistic to transfer them from containers (bowl, squeezy bottle, bowl) to water them all down etc.  The squeezy bottle worked great for icing!  It took a couple cookies to get into a rhythm, but by the 3rd and 4th we were icing like pros!

To get the cute block lines we used food writers.  They are very cool, and very handy.  After the icing on the cookies hardened, (we let them sit overnight) we used a ruler draw on straight lines.

You should be able to purchase food writers at Michaels.

These cookies were so much fun!  If you plan on making them, I would suggest doing it with a friend!  They are time consuming, but I promise they are worth it.

I was talking about them today, and a random lady in an elevator overheard and thought they sounded like the coolest thing ever!  I promise your friends will be just as impressed!

p.s. ♥ jordyn