Tummy Thrills: Christmas Cookies

Christmas is a time when everyone puts on a few pounds and hey, it's the holidays right, so why not? Why not bake those butter cookies and make them as pretty as can be with colourful icing or chocolate! Christmas is just 2 days away! Boy, does time fly or what! We actually wanted to try our hand at Royal Icing for these butter cookies but unfortunately, the stores (we went to three) have seem to run out of meringue powder so we couldn't make that happen. But see how we thought of another way instead of Royal Icing to get our cookies done in time!

Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

370g all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
225g butter
180g sugar (If you're not going to ice your cookies put 200g)
1 egg
1 tbsp milk

Instructions:

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl.
Whisk the butter and sugar till a pale yellow.
Add the egg and milk. Combine well.
Put the mixer on low and add the flour slowly. The mixture should pull away from the bowl.
Divide the dough in half and wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 2 hours.
Dust a clean surface and your rolling pin with flour. And roll away.
Cut the cookies with cute cookie cutters and place them on a baking tray.
Bake for 5 to 8 minutes (depending on the size of your cookies) at 190 degrees. Do watch the cookies cause baking times may vary with different ovens. So if the sides of your cookies are starting to turn brown, they should be done.
Let them cool on a cooling rack and put them in air tight containers to make sure they stay crisp.

Like I said above, we couldn't make Royal Icing due to missing meringue powder but after much thinking (after two days), we decided to decorate the cookies using white chocolate and try adding colouring to it to make it more fun. If you don't have time to do the baking and decorating all in a day, you can always bake the cookies a few days in advance and then decorate them another day.

Chocolate Icing
What you need:

White chocolate compound.
Food colouring (Red,Yellow, Blue, Green)
Piping bags- or plastic bags and cut a hole at the end.
To be creative! It doesn't have to be perfect!

We used Beryl's white chocolate compound which we bought from the bakery, but any other white chocolate compound will do. The Beryl's chocolate was a little sweet so if you know that your chocolate is very sweet then by all means, cut down the sugar on your cookie dough recipe so you won't give everyone a sugar rush or diabetes!

Chop the chocolate into pieces (the smaller,the better) and put into a bowl over a double boiler.
Allow the chocolate to melt until half of the chocolate is melted while constantly stirring with spoon.
Take bowl off double boiler and continue to stir allowing the rest of the chocolate to melt. The point of taking the bowl off when only half the chocolate is melted is so that the chocolate doesn't separate.
Pour the melted chocolate into separate bowls to mix colour in. Remember to add colouring drop by drop, a little at a time. Mix, and add more colouring only if you want a more concentrated colour. Mix evenly.
Pour coloured chocolate into pipping bags (or plastic bags with tips cut).
Outline the cookie shape and then fill the inner part of the cookie.
Have fun, there aren't any other rules to decorating!
Allow for the chocolate to cool on the cookie and it should harden.