Last Christmas, my Mom told her friends Aunty Sheau Huei and Aunty Serene about me baking cookies.
Just so happened they were looking for 100 cookies to give to friends for a Christmas party.
So my Mom and I got busy over 3 days in mid-December, baking and decorating 100 star-shaped cookies (we also made a handful of angels — I wanted more but Mom said they took way too long to ice and decorate so she let me do about 6 of them).
Mom used Martha Stewart's sugar cookie recipe and I helped her to make the dough. The thing about cookies is that the dough
a. cannot be overmixed or your cookies turn out hard and tasteless (I had just done a batch of gingerbread that was not exactly yummy :( )
b. has to be put in the fridge to harden before you can roll it out and cut it.
Mom and I made 6 batches of sugar cookie dough and wrapped each one in clingwrap and stuck them in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
I tried to help Mom do the cookie-cutting but the dough was so buttery and soft, Mom was so frustrated I figured I should go and watch The Incredibles on DVD with my sister while Mom calmed down.
By the time my animated movie ended, Mom had baked the first batch.
"You do the icing okay?"
Mom and I decided we would do up 3 batches - white (plain), yellow (lemon-flavoured) and pink (strawberry-flavoured). She did the outline of the stars with a stiffer icing, then I did the flooding (which is squirting a wet icing over the body of the cookie and spreading it).
Mom is really bad at flooding. She hates doing it. "ARGH! It's going over my outline!" she would shout, and I would have to take the cookie away from her before she throws it in the bin.
Mom had bought a whole bunch of edible decor but we narrowed it down to a few:
- pink crisp balls
- gold crisp balls
- multi-color pastel star sprinkles
- purple sanding sugar
- and this small multi-color sanding sugar bottle she bought
- hundreds and thousands
It was fun making the plain cookies look pretty. But I got pretty tired around the 74th cookie so Mom took over.
The final cookies to be finished were the angels — I drew on their faces, wings and hair with edible ink markers!
Our clients loved the cookies and Tweeted them :)
And our net profit was $80 and Mom split it 50-50 with me, so I got $40 to buy Christmas presents with! Hooray!
And this is what 100 cookies looks like from the stairs!
