You can see the results of the chaos for yourself, below. I do try very hard to be a tidy cook, and usually I am but then there are those occasions when it seems necessary, somehow, to use every possible dish and utensil in the kitchen. Today was one of those days. Ah well - at least making the mess was fun!
The bread was just normal white bread (which actually turned out remarkably well - great texture and just the right amount of seasoning) and I only made it because we were out of any form of bread in the house and couldn't be bothered going to the shops. But I've been pondering on getting into the Christmas spirit of late and decided that there could be no better way of channeling the joys of Christmas than by a spot of cookie baking and icing!
Just a standard dry biscuit recipe for this one - butter, caster sugar, egg yolk, vanilla, flour, and I added a little spice (all spice and nutmeg) just to give a hint of wintery-festivity to them. I rolled the dough out to about 5mm thick then used my newly-purchased cutters to make Christmas trees, shooting stars, snow-people (mine are rather gender neutral snow people as you can see by their ambivalent dress and accessorising, below), candy canes and stars. Slowly baked in a gentle oven and then iced when cool. Such fun!
Admittedly these wee candy-canes aren't the most professionally iced...none of the cookies are really. I don't have a proper piping bag set or a proper icer-contraption (sort of like a syringe-type device? Mum always had one...) so I was using plastic bags with wee holes cut in. Bit more of a challenge using them, let me tell you!
Said gender-non-specific snow-people. Don't you just love their jaunty hats and scarves?!
I think I'll take some cookies up to Glasgow with us when we go for Christmas but before that I'll go to a cake decorating shop (oddly, Darlington has at least 3 of these speciality icing/cake shops. A weirdly large number in a town which doesn't boast a proper beauty salon, fishmonger or cinema of consequence, don't you think? I have to admit this intrigues me more than a little...) Have you ever noticed how you can never get properly red icing when using shop-bought red food colouring? It infuriates me; especially so in the case of Christmas-icing efforts (honestly, who ever heard of pink decorations on Christmas trees?! So, I'll get some of that proper decorator's icing colour paste stuff and see if that makes a redder red.
But I'm quite pleased with this lot of trial-run Christmas cookies. I sang Christmas tunes while frosting and got myself liberally smeared in various sticky, sugary substances in the process. I've eaten little other than icing and raw cookie dough today which is potentially not the most well-balanced of diets, but I must say I do feel decidedly less-Grinch-like than I have been.
So - oven installed and working, cookies baked and iced, Christmas spirit activated...all in all a very successful Saturday!
Now, it's 11pm...time to clean up the kitchen chaos!
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