Merry Christmas and happy New Year to all of you!
This year I wanted to give people presents that were entirely homemade. The idea of a Christmas food hamper came to mind when I began making chutney with my parents in the autumn. I enjoyed the process so much that I was pretty set on the idea and enlisted Ben, my boyfriend, to help.
The homemade elements of our hampers comprised spiced pear chutney, mulling syrup, a decorative pomander, cheese biscuits, mulled orange and rhubarb jam and a Father Christmas sugar cookie.
This post will focus on how to make the Father Christmas sugar cookie!
Makes 24 large cookies
Ingredients
Sugar Cookie
-225g unsalted butter, softened
-200g caster sugar
-2 eggs
-2 tsp vanilla extract
-475g plain flour
-2 tsp baking powder
Frosting
-1 kg icing sugar
-1/2 tsp cream of tartar
-12-14 tablespoons of pasteurized egg whites in a carton
-Food colouring (I used Wilton's Complete Set of 20 Food Gel Past Colours and Wilton White Icing Colour)
-Piping bags
-Fine paint brush
-Cup of water
Method
Sugar Cookies
1) In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Stir in the eggs and vanilla and then add in the flour and baking powder. Mix together until the the mixture forms a dough. Chill the dough for half an hour.
2) Preheat the oven to 180C fan and grease baking trays.
3) On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to 1/2 cm thickness. Cut into desired shape (I used a father Christmas cookie cutter from Amazon). Place the cookies 3cm apart onto the baking trays.
4) Bake for 15 minutes in the oven until the edges of the cookies are light brown. Remove from the baking tray and cook on wire racks.
Icing
1) In a large bowl, mix together the icing sugar and cream of tartar. Then, add the egg whites to the bowl. Stir the contents with a spoon and then use a mixer to combine the ingredients. This mixture should make a thick glue-like consistency.
TIP: Depending on the desired consistency, you can add icing sugar to thicken it, or add a few teaspoons of water to loosen it. A YouTube video that really helped me achieve the correct consistency for various techniques is here: click here.
2) Start off by dividing the mixture between three medium sized bowls. One bowl should have more mixture in than the others. Next, keep the fullest bowl to the side and add red food colouring to one of the remaining bowls. In your third bowl, mix together colours to resemble skin tone. I used ivory, peach and white food gel to achieve this.
3) Once you have three bowls with different colours in (white, red and skin tone), poor half of each mixture into a further three bowls.
4) The first set of bowls are for 'outlining' the cookies with frosting. Add between 1/2 or 3/4 a teaspoon to each bowl to loosen the mixture slightly. If you add too much water, add icing sugar to thicken it up again.
5) The second set of the bowls shall be used for 'flooding' the cookies. Add between 2-3 tsp of water to each bowl to loosen the mixture. Again, if you add to much water, add icing sugar to thicken it up.
6) Scoop the entire contents of each bowl into its own piping bag. Label each bag so you are aware which one is which. Cut a very small hole for the 'outlining' piping bags and a slightly larger hole for the 'flooding' piping bags.
7) Start off by outlining the beard and white parts of the hat with the white outlining piping bag. Next, fill them with the white flooding piping bag. Outline the red hat and fill it in with the red flooding piping bag. Next, flood the face with the skin tone flooding bag. Leave to set in a cool place. Repeat this step on all of the cookies.
8) When the first layer of cookies have set, using your skin tone outlining piping bag, pipe in a nose and fill it in with the skin tone flooding bag. Next, outline a white large mustache on the face and fill it in with the white flooding bag.
9) Using the white outlining bag, add squiggles to the hat and bobble to add texture and pipe in eyebrows onto the face.
10) Using a very fine paint brush, dip the brush into black food colouring and wipe off the excess. Then, draw the eyes onto each cookie.
11) Leave the cookies to set for at least an hour.
Storage: Keep in a cool dry place - these cookies can last up to 3 weeks
Credit: Julia M Usher Video and All Recipes UK
