Sugar cookies, nom!

Something I've discovered over the recent Christmas season is that I apparently have a fondness for baking. Despite the fact that I am a well seasoned banana bread maker, I never stopped to think about baking other things. That changed in December, when I decided to make some sugar cookies with the recipe I found here.

I quickly discovered that even just mixing the cookie dough was fun for me. Without a mixer, I was doing it by hand - and as I'm sure anyone who's done so before, creaming butter and sugar by hand is not exactly easy. Even so, I was very happy with how the dough turned out. I even had to stop myself from just sitting down and eating it there and then! (Luckily, common sense won out, and I didn't make myself ill by eating a mixture with raw egg in it...)

Of course, with it being Christmas time and all, we had to use the Christmas shapes cookie cutters I've had for ages and never touched. We ended up making a few more cookies than I expected, but considering how good the dough was, I figured that could only be a good thing. They went in the oven, and came out looking (and tasting) even more amazing.

Now, plain sugar cookies are just fine, and almost half the cookies remained exactly as they came out of the oven. However, I was getting the itch to have some fun with the rest of them. Out came a quick and easy icing made with icing sugar, milk, and vanilla. Then came out the food colouring and various cake decorations. The result looked a bit like this:

About half of these were decorated by me. You can kind of tell which ones I started with, and which ones were the last few I did, purely because they get slightly better as I continued (I hope!). I did this by putting the icing into plastic sandwich bags and snipping off the tiniest bit of the corner. This let me squeeze the icing out to make the different designs. I have to say, this was by far the most fun I've had baking in a long time.

The last picture here is of my favourite cookie (and another one behind it just to make the picture look nice). This was the last one I made, and took the most care with. As a result, I banned everyone in the house from eating it. It would stay in the box until every other cookie was gone, and then I would get to eat the cookie I was so proud of.

I have done yet more baking since making these, so there will be more stuff to follow. I get the feeling I'm going to be doing a lot of baking this year!