My Dabblings in the Cookie World

     It all started one day a few months ago. I was flipping through a cake magazine when I came across a picture of beautifully decorated wedding cake. It's main decoration were these beautiful lacey flower designs that were so delicate. It was sooooooo pretty! I searched and discovered that the name of the technique is brush embroidery (will write a post on this soon). With high hopes I searched for a demonstration video on YouTube. Lo and behold, there it was...a video posting by SweetAmbs (by Amber Spiegel). I was floored! Her brush embroidery cookies are AMAZING!!! Totally GJW. I was so inspired after looking through her blog for the next 2 hours, I made up a grocery list of the ingredients I would need to make these cookies that night and started baking the next day. The result, not so great. I did get the OoOo's and ahhhs but I wasn't fully satisfied with the overall quality of the cookie. I read that she flavors her cookies with orange and cardamom and lucky for me, I had an OK recipe for orange cardamom cookies from way back when in my recipe stash. I used that recipe and though the cookies tasted good, they did not hold clean edges and the final product looked messy and totally amateur. My royal icing flooding was mediocre at best and my embroidery technique was well, let's just say I had a LONG ways to go before my cookies could even resemble Ms. Spiegel's. But with practice and a few test runs for a good sugar cookie recipe, I was able to create GJW cookies (though these wouldn't be very pleasant to roll around naked in but you get the point).  Even the embroidery flowers have a distinctive look that I've come to like a tad bit better...just a little tiny tiny bit. That's the beauty of baking though...every baked creation has a different nuance to it that is distinctive to its creator.
    My go-to sugar cookie recipe is one that I found on a cookie blog called Lilaloa.blogspot.com. The author is amazingly talented and has a great chocolate sugar cookie recipe and a vanilla variation which is the one I use now for all my cookies. Works beautifully flavored with orange zest and cardamom. The only thing I adjust is the amount of sugar and flour, and of course the flavorings I add when making the orange cardamom version-which is what I posted below.

Orange Vanilla Cardamom Sugar Cookies (My variation from Lilaloa.blogspot.com)

Ingredients:
4 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup butter at room temp.
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking powder
zest of 3 large oranges
1 vanilla bean (If you're fresh out of vanilla beans, just add an extra tsp of extract)
2 tsp ground cardamom

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Cream butter and sugar. In separate bowl, whisk eggs, zest and vanilla seeds from 1 vanilla bean (split top layer of bean down middle-vertically-with a knife, open it up and scrape all the way down with back of knife to get seeds out).  Once the butter mixture is fluffy, add egg mixture and combine well.
3. Sift flour, salt, baking powder and cardamom. Add to wet ingredients 1 cups at a time beating for a few seconds after each addition.
5. Roll out 1/4inch thick on lightly dusted board. Dough should be used right away.
4. Bake for 7 min. Cookies should not be shiny in the middle. As soon as it looses its shininess, they are done. It takes about 7 min in my oven. The edges should not be brown, cookies should be all uniform in a nice pale color.
**NOTE: If you are going to chill dough, use only 3 1/2 cups of flour! Use more flour as needed as you roll and cut out cookie dough. I re-roll the dough about more times and the cookies turn out fine. Makes a lot of cookies but depends on how thick or thin you roll them. I get about 30 cookies with this recipe rolling it 1/4inch thick.


Royal Icing recipe will come soon...if you can't wait, there is a good recipe on Lilaloa (link above).

These are my very first attempt at brush embroidery using
the old orange cardamom recipe. Sub-par.

                                       

With practice, much better quality!

                                                   
     

    GJW!

     I hope to further explore the world of cooking making/decorating in the future but for now I am thoroughly enjoying making (& eating) these. BTW, these orange vanilla cardamom cookies go great w/ Earl Grey tea and are totally GJW without icing.  Make, eat, be merry!