Friday, August 2, 2013

Shark Week Cookies


Every year before Shark Week - I make special treats! My husband loves Shark Week! And the kids like my Shark Week treats! See the label section - on the right and click on Shark Week to see some of the treats I have made in the past.

Today I made some square sugar cookies and some shark sugar cookies. I love making sugar cookies!
I don't remember where I got the square cookie cutter - but I know that I bought the shark cookie cutter at Sur la Table and it was only one dollar!


Ingredients:

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

2/3 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tablespoon light corn syrup

1 tablespoon vanilla

Directions:

In a medium bowl combine the flour and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Mix in the egg, corn syrup and vanilla.

Add the flour 1/3 at a time and mix throughly after each addition.

Divide the dough in half and make two disks.Wrap each disk with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hour.

Tic Tock! It has been two hours.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Get out your parchment paper, cookie sheets, rolling pin and cookie cutters.

Roll out the dough between two lightly floured pieces of parchment paper. Cut out the squares and sharks. The squares took about 7-8 minutes to bake and the sharks 4-5 minutes. Let the cookies cool completely before you start the decorating process.


I happen to have a plethora of decorating sugars. They have a great colored sugar selection at both Williams Sonoma and Michael's. For this project I used blue and silver/gray sugars. I also used a little candy pearl for the eye.

Icing:

4 cups powdered sugar

1/3 cup butter, melted

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 tablespoons milk

Directions:

Combine all of the above ingredients and whisk until everything is combined. If the icing is to runny add an extra tablespoon of powdered sugar. If the icing is too thick add another tablespoon of milk.

Put the icing in a pastry bag or zipper top bag and snip a very small hole. Pipe the icing around the edges of the cookie. Then make a slightly  bigger snip and fill in each cookie.


While the icing is still wet liberally sprinkle each cookie and add the little pearl candy eye.


My trick is to decorate the cookies in a large shallow pan. Thus, the excess sprinkles stay in the pan instead of all over my kitchen.


Don't my sharks look regal with this beautiful silver sanding sugar?


These cookies take three to four hours to completely dry. And Don't forget to watch Shark Week starting August 4th on the Discovery channel. 



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