The recipe is one from the archives – I blogged it for Valentine’s Day but used the recipe for a very different kind of cookie this time. We decorated cookies with fondant for the first time this week. It’s often done at baking camps, so I was keen to see how it worked with my kids. They enjoyed the decorating part a lot and it kept them busy for a good while – so I will definitely try it again.
Vanilla Cookies – Recipe
Ingredients:
- 100 g butter at room temp ( I use unsalted)
- 100 g castor sugar
- 1 beaten egg (I use large)
- 275 g Plain Flour
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 100 g white chocolate to decorate (optional)
Method:
- Preheat oven to 190 (170 fan) and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.
- Using a wooden spoon (or an electric mixer), beat the butter and sugar together until they are light and fluffy.
- Add the beaten egg, a little at a time, until all the egg is absorbed in the mixture.
- Stir in the vanilla essence
- Sieve the flour into the mixture and stir to form a soft dough. Use your hands to bring the crumbs together.
- Wrap in clingfilm. Leave to chill in fridge for 30 mins, this makes it easier to roll out
- Place dough on floured surface and roll out until it is 1cm thick, use any shaped cookie cutters that you have, cut out the dough and place on lined tray. You can re-roll the unused dough to create more cookies. I had some wilton cookie cutters but we also used stars too.
- Bake in the oven for 10 mins or until light golden brown.
- Leave to cool for 5 minutes on baking tray after you remove them from the oven before transferring to a wire rack to cool fully.
To Decorate:
- You will need fondant (any colour), a small paint brush or pastry brush, cookie cutters, sprinkles or dragee (big sprinkles) or any random edible decorations you have.
- I used wilton candy eyeballs, they were on sale last Halloween in HomeStore & More and I had a pack left over. I’m a big fan of them and kids seem to love the effect the eyes give to their baking.
- I also used some icing tubes that I picked up in Dealz. There are 4 small tubes of writing icing for €1.50 and handy for cookies and gingerbread men.
- Roll out a piece of fondant. Using the same cookie cutter used to create the sugar cookie you’re decorating cut out your fondant shape.
- Paint a little water on the back of the fondant shape (or on the actual cookie but only using a teeny bit of water) and stick the fondant onto the cookie. A lot of blogs advise using sugar syrup – but I didn’t bother with that – water worked fine for us. Anything to make the process easier!
- Once the fondant is on the cookie, decorate as you like. No rules just whatever you want to do. We had green stars and blue pumpkins……
- Once decorated, I left the ones that weren’t eaten straight away, on a tray to air dry (so the fondant hardened). That night, I put them in a cardboard box with greaseproof paper over them.
- If you do make them and would like to share pictures on my facebook or Instagram page, I would love to see them. It is lovely to get feedback and know that people are trying my blog recipes x
Enjoy!
De
The Cake Mum 