mothwing | Cookie marathon

We had a cookie baking-and-decorating marathon on Sunday. A few of the guys from the theatre group came round to see us and between the five of us we baked and decorated eight trays of cookies for us and for the pre-Christmas rehearsal on Wednesday. We had brought out the green food colouring for the occasion and finally had an excuse to use the shiny new cookie cutters we bought on the Christmas market two weeks ago.

And what could be more festive than green Apatosauri, chocolaty clefs, notes, butterflies, dogs and bats? Oh, and some stars, too.

I was so busy organising the actual baking and arranging the trays in the oven that my cookies did not turn out as absolutely gorgeous as the ones of the others, who were working wonders with icing, sprinkles, and especially the lilac sugar colour. Except for S., who formed a whole zoo with the help of the dog shape. We understood how she got the goat - slightly shorter tail because of a spot of drier dough, slightly odd ears - even the seal made sense, somehow - hind legs pressed together, the head being roughly the same shape, anyway - but we have no idea how she got to the cock, the mouse or the elephant.

The recipe for the dough:

It's really simple. The dough consists of

3/6 flour
2/6 margarine or butter
1/6 sugar
Baking soda (you need about 1tbsp/300g flour, as far as I'm aware)

I used 900g flour, 1 1/2 tbsps baking soda, 600g margarine, and 300g sugar - although if you're going to use icing on the cookies you can use a lot less than I did. Eggs are apparently supposed to make the dough dry (according to a forum in which people discussed their time at a professional baker's during an internship. Huh, the more you know), and I prefer not to add what I don't really need. I am not sure if the dough would have tasted any different, had I added the eggs, but I doubt it wouldn't have been as tasty.