A found a recipe for a cookie I wanted to try and oh boy were they a hit! I made them for someone at work as a going away present (so she got all the really pretty ones lol) and the rest I gave away, most of them to other people at work and some to my landlords.
It’s actually a pretty easy recipe, which I will put right here…
Preheat Oven to 350 degrees
Ingredients:
1 Cup Butter
2 Cups Sugar
3 Eggs
2 tsp. Almond Extract
4 Cups Flour
1 tbsp. Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Cream of Tartar
1/2 tsp Salt
Cream together the butter and sugar until blended.
Add in the eggs, mix well.
Add in the rest of the ingredients.
Don’t panic! The batter will be very thick!
Add in a few drops of red food colouring and stir through for a pretty pink colour. You don’t want to over mix at this point, you want the batter to have pink swirls in it, not be entirely pink.
Cover and chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
Roll into balls and place them on a greased cookie sheet. Flatten the balls slightly before baking. Or do what I did and use your snazzy new cookie dough scoop (think ice cream scoop) so your hands don’t get messy and your cookies are all the same size.
Bake in a Preheated 350 degree oven for around 10 to 12 minutes. Careful, they burn easy! (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything 😉 )
Once removed from the oven, glaze the cookies with the following glaze recipe, make sure to do this while they are still warm.
1 Cup Powdered Sugar
1/2 tsp. Almond Extract
1 to 3 Tbsp. milk
1 to 2 drops red food colouring – you want a pretty pink glaze
When making this glaze, if it is quite thick, add more milk or if too runny, add more powdered sugar, until you get it to a spreading consistency.
I don’t recommend topping with sprinkles, I tried that and they melted, making the cookie look like it had smeared drops of blood in the glaze (I used red sprinkles) lol When I tried topping a different cookie with sprinkles, once it and the glaze had cooled a bit, it was too late and the glaze wouldn’t hold the sprinkles. Finicky little things!
The recipe makes a huge amount of cookies, I burned one entire tray (oops!) and still ended up with more than I knew what to do with.
My dough ended up thicker and a bit dryer than the mixture I saw in the original recipe, and because of that my pink swirls ended up more like pink dots, which taste wise is fine, they were still good. But looks wise, could use improvement. I didn’t take in to account change in atmosphere, humidity, etc, when making the cookies. Next time I might make them a tad less dry so I can swirl the colour, see what result that gets me.
The cookie itself has a lovely soft middle with a slight crunch on the outside. The addition of the almond extract in both the cookie and glaze is what people love (I think), because it is different and not the flavour you are expecting when you bite in.
I think it would be a great cookie to make if you needed something to give away, say in a cookie exchange, or for presents, or even to take to a gathering, because it makes so many, isn’t overly sweet, and is pretty. 🙂
Aaaaand because it is always important to give credit where credit is due here is a link to the YouTube video where I got the recipe from…
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 