A Recipe For Insanity

Around this time of year, in addition to spending obscene amounts of time hand-crafting Halloween costumes for my kids (the one activity I perform a year that elevates my Mommy status from bare-minimum to just above just getting by), I also enjoy making and eating sugar cookies. You know, with the chilled dough and the rolling pins and the cookie cutters and the colored frosting. Old School. I whipped up a batch or four of sugar cookies just this very week. Blue bats and spider webs, orange owls, yellow moons, and green haunted houses (not pictured).



I wrapped them up in gift bags and took them to school to give to the teachers and office staff who love and tolerate my children on a daily basis. If there is any bit of advice I can give to parents of kids just starting out on their school careers, it is this: Always bring in homemade gifts/treats to the women of the front office. Teachers, deservedly, get lots of gifts and treats each holiday, but those women in the office get squat. They will know and interact with your children on a daily basis, particularly the school nurse. So give these women what they deserve, sugar.

And now for my favorite sugar cookie recipe (complete with icing):

Note: these cookies are not your typical sugar cookie. They are not overly sweet (but rest assured, the icing is). These cookies are best with this particular icing. Kids like them, but I have found it is the adults that really really love them. A good sugar cookie is my absolute favorite cookie, and these taste like childhood. You will sniff the icing and eat the cookie and you will think: Christmas. Now that I have completely over-sold these cookies......

White Velvet Cutouts (from allrecipes.com)

1 cup butter

3 oz cream cheese (the good stuff)

1 cup white sugar

1 egg yolk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg yolk and vanilla. Stir in the flour. Gather the dough into a ball and chill overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 F. On a lightly floured counter top, roll out dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Cut into desired shapes and place on an ungreased baking sheet.

Bake for 5 minutes and turn pan around. Cook one sheet at a time. Bake another 3-5 minutes until the cookies are set and the edges have just begun to get some color. Let cool. Frost with:

1 cup powdered sugar

2 teaspoons milk

2 teaspoons light corn syrup

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

pinch of salt

In a small bowl stir together sugar and milk until smooth. Beat in the corn syrup and almond extract. (Here at my house I have to double the milk and corn syrup because we are so dry. If it is too thick, the recipe recommends thinning with more corn syrup.) Divide icing into separate bowls and add food coloring. Apply a thin layer of icing with a knife (the icing should be thin enough to create a thin sheet of icing that will harden as it sits.) This icing is fun to use because the colors are so intense, especially if you use the paste type colors instead of the liquids, although those work just fine.