tasty tuesday: bison cookies (chocolate sugar cookies)

I am ridiculously excited to share these cookies with you all.  They are bison!!!  And they're hilarious.  Totally a man cookie.  So make these for your man friends and I guarantee they'll be pretty stoked (mine definitely were).

I made these bad boys as a snack for my mini Grey Cup party (that's like the Superbowl for Canadian football in case you're confused) I hosted a million years ago in November right before Christmas took over the blog.  Ha!  One of my friends has a dream to own a bison ranch when he "grows up", so I knew these would be perfect to make!

Jordyn and I debated doing gingerbread for the cookie base, but eventually decided that we wanted something a little simpler.  I decided that chocolate shortbread might be the way to go, however, recipe after recipe called for several hours of chilling the dough, and that just wasn't cool with my timeline.  So, we decided to just try something new!  Jordyn adapted our favorite sugar cookie recipe (see it here, here, and here!), and it turned out beautifully.

Chocolate Sugar Cookies

by: Jordyn Siemens

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 Tbsp milk
1 3/4 cups flour

1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder

Directions

1) In a small bowl, cream butter - add sugar, vanilla, egg and milk; beat hard.
2) Add flour, cocoa powder and baking powder to cream mixture and beat again.
3) Roll onto a floured counter and cut into shapes.
4) Bake at 400 degrees F for 5-6 minutes.

Decorating

Icing (either soft butter cream or royal icing)

Chocolate sprinkles

Black icing (we bought a tube from Michaels)

1)  I used royal icing to outline where I wanted the bison's fur to be, leaving out the shape of the horn to fill in later.

2) Then I pressed chocolate sprinkles into the icing, and shook off any excess.

3)  Once the icing had set, I added in a small horn with white icing, as well as a black dot for eyes and black hooves.

*next time I'll use chocolate icing so that you can't see the white through the chocolate sprinkles.

I love how well these turned out, and am pretty stoked to have a new, no-fuss chocolate sugar cookie recipe.  It'll be great for more animal cookies that are sure to happen in the future!

p.s. ♥ kelsey

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