My Cookie Garden

After 3 continuous nights of baking, finally, here's the results:



Starting from scratch... with this:


and this:


to:


Little Miss Spider. The leg breaks easily, haiz.


Caterpillar. I like this shade of green!


"Blindly" Busy Bee...


A gaint flower baked in a floral cookie pan.


Another flower... tribal style.


The classic lady bird. I ruined the icing when my itchy finger go touch touch. tsk.


Meet my gypsy lady bird, dressed in gum paste daisies which was bought from Phoon Huat.



Eggless Butter Cookie
The recipe given by the school is the rather standard roll-out butter cookie recipe which you will find almost everywhere; on the back of a cookie cutter pack, flour packaging, cookbook!
The only difference is I made making it eggless and omit the baking powder (cos I want the cookie to retain its shape).

230g butter
200g sugar
250g plain flour, sifted
40g corn starch
2 tsp vanilla essence

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160-170C.



2. Cream butter and sugar with electric mixer or wooden spoon until light and fluffy.



3. Beat in vanilla essence.



4. Add flour mixture, 1 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition. The recipe says the dough should be stiff but mine was not. I thought I missed the measurement or what ... so I made another batch - it is a very soft dough, at least in my case.



5. If your dough is also soft like mine, refrigerate for few hours until it is hard enough for decent rolling and cutting.



6. Baked 20min or until it starts to brown on the edge.

A few baking tips that I picked up from this round of baking:

• Roll the dough directly onto the baking sheet or paper, cut out the cookie and remove the surplus around this. This method reduces the handling of the cookie dough, hence preserves the shape better, specially if you have cookie cutter with intricate design.



• Freezing helps the cookie to retain the shape better during baking.
  

This one is decorated with fondant. I find ready-to-use fondant a breeze to use. Just open the package, grab a blob, dab on the colour, knead, and voila, all ready!
So easy that even my 3-year-old used the balance fondant to make his own cookies:




Kathryn's (the course instructor) work:





When my other course mates send me their pix, I will update them here.