Christmas Baking

Now I know Christmas has passed, but I never showed you any of my baking for Christmas, so I thought I would share it with you.

For the first time ever I made sugar cookies and flooding icing.

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What you need:
– 1 cup of sugar
– 2 cups of plain flour
– 1/2 cup of butter
– 1 egg
– 1 tsp baking powder

  1. Preheat the oven to 150 degrees and have a cookie sheet ready. I use a silicone sheet because it is easier to get the cookies off the sheet afterwards.
  2. Cream the butter and the sugar together until it is light and fluffy
  3. Add the egg until it is combined
  4. Add the baking powder and the flour to the mixture. Mix this well.
  5. On a floured surface, roll out the dough to as thick or as thin as you like. Use cookie cutters to cut out the shapes.
  6. Bake for approximately 10 minutes or just before they turn a golden brown colour.
  7. Once the cookies are baked, take them off of your cookie sheet and place them somewhere to cool.

This next part I found the trickiest which is the icing. I tried the method of flooding the cookies with royal icing.

You will need:
– 2 cups of icing sugar
– 1 egg white
– 2 tbsp of water (you can always add more)

  1. The simplest thing about this is actually making the icing. All you need to do to is put everything into a bowl and mix it together. You will know when the icing is done when you lift the spoon and the icing sinks into the icing and becomes invisible.
  2. I found the easiest way to do this was to outline the shape on the cookie that you want and then fill in. However, this was still tricky. To get the best results you need your cookie needs to be flat and on a flat surface otherwise the icing will run off the side of the cookie (take that from experience!)

As a first timer when it comes to flooding icing and sugar cookies I don’t think these are that bad! They are quite tasty though!

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I also made a cake. This is a basic victoria sponge recipe, so I won’t bore you on how to make that!

The only thing that I did differently was that I cooked this in a Pyrex bowl because I wanted to make it into an igloo and therefore needed a semi-circular shape. One thing I will say is that it took much longer to cook all the way through so leave it a bit longer than normal.

One thing I did enjoy was all of the decorating and I want to thank my Mum for helping me decorate this because I am not the best at decorating!

All we did was put on some ready roll icing because we didn’t want to make it! We then scored it with a blunt knife to make the brick shapes. We made some simple snowmen because I felt there was something else needed. My Mum made some penguins out of the ready roll icing because my favourite bird is a penguin and also birds and igloos clearly go together! For the finishing touches I sifted some icing sugar round the outside to make some sort of snow.

It is a very simple cake, but it looks great even if I do say so myself!

Hope you enjoy Christmas!

~Ciara~

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