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Remember that super funny joke I told you last week where I said I wasn't going to leave you hanging on the whole "making molds and making cookies" thing and that I would be RIGHT BACK to tell you the rest of it? That was hilarious. Best joke of my life.
Even better than the joke I told my husband about how I'm going to fill my kids' days with super fun and exciting learning activities that engage their minds and inspire them to reach their full potential as amazing little human beings of amazingness ...and then I let them watch Korean cartoons before breakfast.
It was also better than the joke where my oven broke.
And better than the joke where I told myself I'm going to go to sleep early. And not read cookie blogs and cookie facebook posts into the wee hours of the morning. (Although, that one really was funny. Ha ha ha. I still laugh just thinking about it.)
Wow. When you put them all together like that...it kind of makes me realize that I am telling a lot of funny jokes these days. I bet that secretly, my kids just love being around me all day long. They probably just want to pretend that I'm not any fun at all because they are hoping to someday become big, famous movie stars and they need to practice. I should go tell them that they are really talented. And then maybe I should tell them another joke. Ooh, I'll them the joke about how they have to pick up their own toys because I'm not going to do it for them. That's a good one.
You know what's NOT a joke? You can make these cookies from start to finish in under an hour. Seriously, I don't kid around about stuff like that.
1) Grab a ball of cookie dough. Roll it around in your hands a couple of times so there aren't big ol' gaping crevices. Little crevices are fine.
2) Mush it down on top of your mold. (Instructions to make your own HERE.) You can use a rolling pin if you want to. I didn't want to. I wanted character in these cookies. Good old fashioned American character in the form of lumpiness and unevenness. The kind of character that puts hair on your chest and umm....that was awkward....
3) Flip the mold and lumpy cookie dough over onto a baking sheet. The cookie dough should just plop right out. (Plop? That's kind of a weird word when you say it out loud.)
4) Use a scalloped cutter, or a round cutter, or any shape cutter really, to cut around the molded part. Bake. Allow to cool.
This is my very favorite part of all. Buy some Americolor gold AIRBRUSH color. Pour some into the lid. Grab a food-safe paintbrush and quickly brush the gold color over the raised part of the cookie. The design will pop right out. (In a good way. Not in the way where you have to pick it up off the floor and try to re-attach it, but it never quite fits back together.) If you want to, you could also add a nice gilded border.
HINTS:
** It is REALLY important that you use a NON-SPREADING recipe for molded cookies. I used my vanilla recipe, but my chocolate recipe works just as well. (I used the chocolate with THESE cameo cookies.)** I baked my cookies for an extra 2 minutes because the center part is thicker than I usually roll my cookies.
** The cookies looked puffy right when I took them out of the oven and I thought the design had been ruined. But as they cooled, the design stood out more and more. So...you know...remember that.
** Make your own mold using THESE INSTRUCTIONS.
** If you don't want to make your own molds, you can always buy some. You can buy this design, or many others HERE at Decorate The Cake.
