Wedding Blog

for the rolled cookies -

its a good idea to not overwork your dough. it’ll make them tough

let your dough chill like amysue said or you’ll get sticky warm dough and it’ll be really hard to work with

put some flour on your cookie cutter before you use it so it wont stick

its a good idea that all your ingredients be room temp before you add them (butter, eggs etc) unless your recipe says otherwise. (and a lot of times they do!)

thats stuff my aunt taught me (she’s a wonderful sweets maker! she’s making my cake!) and they’ve helped me make some tasty cookies over the years.

good luck!!

Lovely cookie idea - oh, and by the way, the only reason you need the butter at room temp. is because it needs to “cream” with the sugar. If the butter is cold when mixed with the sugar, they just turn into “crumbs.” Believe it or not, the butter and sugar “creaming” affects the overall texture and moisture of cookies. Creaming is a really important step.

I like amysue’s idea about freezing the dough, but I would advise you to just chill it before you roll it out. The cookies will cut out easier and will bake off better.

Also, if you check the cookies and they look like they need another minute, as long as the edges are golden (not brown) take them out of the oven. There is a ton of carry-over heat in cookies, even though they are little. The dough will continue to “bake” for another couple of minutes. So leaving them in the oven for the extra few minutes you “think” they need will actually land you with overbaked sweets.

There is a great flourless peanut butter cookie recipe on the Kraft Canada website: http://www.kraftcanada.com/EN/Recipes/RecipeTemplate?recipe_id=85458

I have made these many times and they are amazing, melt-in-your-mouth treats!

I really love my cookie sheets — no idea what brand they are but they have a thin layer of air between the two metal sheets so you can never burn your cookies! They carry then at BB&B and Crate & Barrel (probably Target too). I highly recommend them over the old school dark pans my mom used to have when she taught me how to make cookies!

If the recipe calls for baking on greased cookie sheets, it’s a good idea to use a sil-pad (a mat made of silicone on top of the cookie sheet). That way, you don’t have to grease in between each batch, clean-up is a breeze, and the cookies will bake evenly. Best of luck!

i made about 140 star shaped sugar cookies for a baby shower this year, and here a few things i learned (i’d only made drop cookies before, so maybe you already know all this!):

keep lifting the dough off the floured surface each time or every other time you roll the dough so it doesn’t stick. (it took me a while to figure this one out even though i watch cooking shows all the time — i felt so dumb after i figured it out!).

shaped cookies tend not to cook evenly — the tips of almost all my stars were a browner than the rest of the cookies. but maybe using a silpat sheet and not just parchment would solve this.

icing cookies with even just one flat color is a LOT of work — it took probably six or eight man-hours for inexperienced me and a friend to ice my cookies so the surface was somewhat smooth. dedicate lots of time (or enlist dedicated helpers) to icing (or you could make cookies into sandwiches, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about perfect icing).

i would definitely do a couple of complete (baking and icing) test runs for your cookies so that you have the kinks worked out and so you are nice and calm when you are making the final batch. i wish i had done this instead of procrastinating and making all my cookies the night before.

good luck! key lime sugar cookies sound delicious, and making cookies is always a nice way to spend time with loved ones. :@)