tasty tuesday: as you like it - Shakespeare cookies
"If music be the food of love, play on."
-William Shakespeare
Jordyn and I really love attending plays, musicals and concerts, especially when they're local. We attended Shakespeare's As You Like It last year at Jordyn's university, and were inspired to make some Shakespeare cookies! One of Jordyn's friends was a member of the cast, so we dropped these off before the show as a treat!
For these cookies, all you need is a basic sugar cookie!
Ingredients:
1/2 cup Butter
3/4 cup Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla
1 Egg
1 TBSP Milk (or cream)
2 cup Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
Directions:
1) Cream butter - add sugar, vanilla, egg and milk; beat hard.
2) Add flour and baking powder to cream mixture and beat again.
3) Roll onto flour board and cut into shapes.
4) Bake at 400 degrees F for 5-6 minutes.
We used royal icing as our white base, but buttercream would work as well as long as you smooth it out nicely!
We chose to decorate most of the cookies with a few quotes from the play, as well as the stag motif which was a symbol within the play. We also picked a few well-known quotes from Shakespeare in general to decorate the rest!
For the writing, I just melted down a few (maybe 1/4 of a cup) chocolate chips and placed it in a ziplock bag. I snipped the corner of the bag and went to town writing! I found that handwriting rather than printing the words was much easier, and that the trick is to write quickly! Hesitating or worrying too much will cause shaky lines and more mistakes. I also suggest practicing a bit on wax paper before you try it on a cookie!
For the stag's head, we found it easiest to pre-draw the lines on the back of wax paper, and then pipe the chocolate on over it. We let them set completely in the freezer before placing them on the cookies. Then we used a blow dryer to "melt" the heads to the cookies...we didn't want them falling off!
We hope you liked it!
p.s. ♥ kelsey and jordyn