Ingredients ?
Cookie Ingredients
Low gluten flour 125g
Butter 60g
Sugar 35g
Milk 15g
Frosting Ingredients
Powdered sugar 150g
Egg whites 22g
Lemon juice 8g (add as appropriate)
Coloring moderate amount
How to make sugar cookies ?
First make the cookies. Cut small pieces of butter and soften, add fine sugar and beat with a whisk until fluffy in volume and light in color.
Add the milk and continue to beat well until it becomes fluffy and creamy.
Sift the gluten flour into the butter.
Mix with a spatula while pressing, so that the flour and butter are well mixed together. At first, when the flour is not fully mixed with the butter, it will look dry, keep pressing hard and mixing while pressing until it becomes a dough (the mixture will be a little bit drier when the room temperature is lower, at this point, you can also just use your hands to knead the flour and butter into a dough).
After the mixture has been thoroughly mixed into a dough, do not continue mixing. Overmixing may result in a tough cookie texture.
Place the dough between two sheets of greaseproof paper, flatten it, and roll it out with a rolling pin to make a sheet about 0.5cm thick. Remove the greaseproof paper from the surface after rolling.
Use a cookie cutter to cut out the desired shape.
After cutting, remove the excess dough and use a spatula to scoop up the cookie dough, carefully transferring it to a parchment paper lined baking sheet, handling it with care so that it doesn't get misshapen. You can knead the excess dough together and roll it out again before carving (repeated kneading of the dough many times will make the baked cookies too hard, so try to minimize the number of times you knead the dough haha).
Place the baking sheet in a preheated oven at 165°C, second last layer, and bake for 20-25 minutes. Please adjust the baking time according to the actual condition of the oven and the size of the cookies. Bake the cookies until the tops of the cookies are lightly browned and the cookies feel firm when pressed, then they are ready to come out of the oven.
After the cookies are baked and cooled, they are ready to be decorated with frosting.
Next, make the icing. Whisk the egg whites with chopsticks, then mix with the powdered sugar. Using a spatula, keep tossing the mixture so that the powdered sugar and egg whites are completely blended and the frosting becomes thick and creamy.
Add the lemon juice little by little and mix well. Watch the consistency of the frosting as you add it.
When you pick up the frosting, the drips will flatten out within a few seconds, and the consistency will be about right.
After that, it's time to mix the colors. Add different colors of food coloring to the frosting and mix well to make different colors of frosting. Choose the coloring colors according to your needs, if it's Christmas frosting cookies, red and green are definitely essential for Christmas colors haha. Then put the frosting into the laminating bag, cut a small hole in the front of the laminating bag, you can start decorating the cookies (because the family will not be too much of a portion of frosting at a time, so the coloring can be taken to save some of the method, first white frosting into the laminating bag, and then pick a small amount of coloring directly in the laminating bag and mix with the frosting, with the hands of the laminating bag through the rubbing a few times, the frosting can be mixed with the pigmentation of a good mix of ha ha).
When decorating with frosting, we can see that the frosting on the cookies is divided into two parts, one is the bottom of the whole side of the painted base color, and the other is the surface of the line-like pattern. We need to apply the icing on the whole side of the cookie first, wait for it to dry and then continue to squeeze the pattern on top. You can use a brush dipped in icing to brush the whole surface directly onto the cookie, but this requires a little more skill, or you can do it in the following way: first, extrude the lines of icing in a circle around the cookie as an outline.
Then, within the frosting outline, draw lines of frosting evenly across the entire surface. Because of the fluidity of the frosting, it will become very flat in a matter of seconds (this is also where you check the consistency of the frosting - if it's too thick, it won't flatten out as easily, and the surface will stay grainy and won't have a shiny sheen when it dries. (And if the frosting is too thin, squeezing a little too much will tend to stay along the edges and affect the whole look).
After the base color icing dries, you can continue decorating on top. The snowflake shape in the picture is painted with white icing to create the snowflake pattern. The decorative patterns can be drawn according to your own creativity, just practice a few more times.
Continue decorating the other frosted cookies. When there are more than two base colors on a cookie, paint one color first, and then paint the other color after it dries, otherwise the two colors will easily dissolve together where they touch. For example, if you have a snowman, and the hat and body are two colors, you can paint the hat with black icing first, and then paint the body with white icing after it dries.
Tips
1, this cookie, I use a large mold, a *** do 10 cookies. If you use a small mold, 15-20 cookies is no problem. When baking, the cookies should be baked through for good flavor. Especially large cookies, do not use too high a temperature, low temperature and slowly baked, the surface becomes slightly yellow, after baking, if the cookies are still very soft to the touch, you can reduce the temperature, continue to bake for a few moments, so that it is completely baked through.
2, frosting used in the egg white, is to make the frosting has the toughness of the essential raw materials. Many people are concerned about whether raw egg whites can be eaten directly. In fact, the frosting contains very high sugar levels, high sugar environment itself has a strong antibacterial effect. Choose fresh, good quality eggs and don't worry too much about it at all.
3, frosting to dry before you can continue to decorate, in the dry climate of the north, dry up is very fast, ten minutes is almost. If you want to speed up the drying process, you can put the cookies in the oven and bake them at a low temperature of 60-80 degrees Celsius, and they will dry quickly.
4. To draw beautiful lines, the consistency of the frosting is key. You can try more, I believe that soon you will be able to grasp how the consistency of the best operation. Adjust the concentration with lemon juice, if there is no lemon juice, white vinegar can also be. You have to add it little by little and stop when you reach the right consistency. Very little lemon juice can make a big difference in the consistency of the frosting, so be careful when you add it.
5, making frosting, in the choice of powdered sugar, commercially available powdered sugar can be, but the commercially available powdered sugar contains a small amount of corn starch, the frosting is not as good as using pure powdered sugar texture. I like to use a processor or a wall breaker to beat the sugar directly into powdered sugar for use, and use it now. This way, I get pure powdered sugar, which makes the frosting brighter in color and better in texture. You can choose according to your own situation haha.