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BIG Confession here! While I am a certified Chocoholic, that is not the only sweet I like. Before my arthritis made it too difficult to do so many things, I used to be creative like this. I loved making and decorating cookies. When I came across these, it brought back such wonderful memories that I just had to share!
Donna
Now that I am able to get back into the kitchen and the kids are back in school I wanted to make something sweet to celebrate the new season, and I knew it had to be sunflowers to remind me of those beautiful sunflowers nature treated us to. For these sunflowers I wanted something a little a bit more “fall” then vanilla, so I took LilaLoa’s Vanilla 2.0 recipe and mixed it up just a bit to create these brown sugar maple cookies. This recipe turned out wonderful and as a huge perk my kitchen smelled like maple for 2 days!
BROWN SUGAR MAPLE COOKIES
1 cup slightly softened butter
1 cup brown sugar (ran through a blender to make fine)
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
2 extra large eggs
1 tablespoon maple extract
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
4 (or 4 1/2 cups) flour
Step 1. Beat together butter and brown sugars. Add eggs and maple and beat until combined.
Step 2. Add in salt and baking powder and beat until combined.
Step 3. Start by adding 3 cups of flour, mix until combined. Slowly add more flour until dough is no longer sticky and holds together. If you’re going to chill the cookie dough and use later you can stop now. If you’re going to roll right away it’s best to add 1/2 cup more to bring it to a thicker consistency for immediate rolling.
Step 4. Roll and cut cookies, place on parchment paper lined cookie tray and freeze for 2 minutes. Bake at 350 for 7-12 minutes depending on size and thickness of cookies. For more info on my rolling and baking process check out Rolled Cookies 101here.
Once your cookies are done cooling it’s time to decorate! I found sunflowers to be one of the more tricky flowers to ice, those long little abundant petals are hard to recreate with icing. Here’s a quick step by step of how I created my sunflowers using a cutter from Wilton’s large 101 cutter set, brown piping & flooding icing, yellow piping and flooding icing, brown sanding sugar, a circle cutter, and a food marker.
Step 1. Use a circle cutter and a food marker to draw a circle in the center of the cookie. This step is optional but for those of use who aren’t the greatest with nice circles this helps a lot.
Step 2. Outline the circle with brown piping icing and then flood with brown flooding icing. Then gently sprinkle brown sanding sugar over the entire circle and let sit for about an hour. This is a great time to ice any other cookies like leaves and birds.
Step 3. Once centers have firmed gently shake off excess sanding sugar. Using yellow outline icing pipe every other petal on the sunflower and then fill it with yellow flood icing. Do this for all your sunflowers.
Step 4: Once the yellow petals have firmed a bit use your yellow outline icing to outline the outside of the left over petals, just the tips of them, no need to go all the way back to the center. Then fill the leftover petals with yellow flood icing.
Step 5: Once the yellow hard firmed, finish cookies with small dot of brown around the center using your brown piping icing.
Of course you can add simple cookies to go by using little acorns, leafs and little birds. To create your own patch, once your cookies are dry you can flip them over and use extra icing to “glue” your cookies to straws.
Borrowed from – makebakecelebrate.com
