Hey everyone, Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I'm showing you how to make frosted animal cookies.
These iced animal cookies are so much better than
anything you can buy at the store. I actually found this recipe a couple
weeks ago when I was raiding my grandmother's old cookbooks and I had to
try it out. This one actually came clipped from a super old magazine. I made
a few adjustments to make the flavor and the texture of the cookie just right.
I think you're going to love it. Now to get started, the first thing you want to do
is get your oven preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Next you are going to
need 12 tablespoons or one and a half sticks of unsalted butter and you want
this to be softened. We're gonna add this to a large bowl.
We're also going to add one and a half cups of granulated sugar.
And now use an electric mixer just to beat the butter and sugar together until they're nicely combined.
Now we're going to add two large eggs.
A teaspoon of salt
A teaspoon of vanilla extract
And finally I recommend adding a 1/2 teaspoon of princess emulsion. Now what
this is, is it's a flavor it's like an almond, lemon, citrusy flavor and it
really really reminds me of the taste of traditional animal cookies, and in fact I
know. I didn't figure this out on my own. The lady who works at my local cake shop
actually told me about it, and it really makes a huge difference in these animal
cookies. Now if you can't get your hands on it
don't panic. These cookies are still gonna be great with the vanilla extract.
You can even use a little bit of almond extract for flavor, but this really adds
a great flavor. I found this at my local cake shop, but also my local Walmart has
it. So look around you might find it easier than you think. We're gonna add a half teaspoon of this.
Use your electric mixer just to beat everything together now until everything is nicely combined.
The next thing you need is four and a half cups of
all-purpose flour. You can also use unbleached flour. I've tried both of
these flours in this recipe and either works great. We're going to gradually stir this into our butter mixture.
Now this is a pretty dry cookie dough. That's fine. It's supposed to be like
that and thanks to this we're not going to have to chill our dough, but once
you've mixed everything together and your dough starts to get a little
crumbly, and most of the flour's been absorbed, I usually switch over just
using a spatula and just stirring the dough together that way. Making sure all
of the flour gets completely absorbed and just stirring until the dough is
really starting to be cohesive and clinging together.
The reason I don't like to go too far with my electric mixer is because you run the risk of
warming up your butter too much and ending up with a sticky cookie dough
that you would actually have to chill in order to get it to work when we go to cut out our cookies.
Once you have your dough nicely combined, we're gonna go
ahead and roll it out onto a clean lightly floured surface. So I'm just
gonna dust my surface with a little bit of flour, and because this recipe makes so
much dough, I usually only like to work with about half of it at a time. So it's
still a little crumbly. That's fine we'll work it together in a second.
Didn't mean to send it flying everywhere.
I'm just gonna use my hands to kind of work it together.
And once you have a pretty smooth ball, or a disc, like I have right here,
you're gonna want to roll this out so that it's a quarter of an inch thick.
Once you have your dough rolled out, you're going to want to grab your animal
cookie cutters. Now I got these off of Amazon. You can really use any cookie
cutter. You'll just have to adjust the baking time if you use larger or smaller
ones, but I'll leave a link for these exact ones in the description below. So
you're just going to cut out your cookies.
And drop them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Now these cookies should not spread very much at all. So you only want to give
them about an inch of space between cookies. That way you can cook as many as
possible at one time. This recipe makes a lot of cookies so you're gonna want to
take advantage of the space on your cookie sheet.
Now if you find that your cookie dough is sticking to your cookie cutters, you're having trouble getting it
out, you can always just dust these with a little bit of flour.
Generally I like them to stick a little bit because it makes it easier for me to transfer them
over to the baking sheet, but if they're sticking too much, you're not able to get
them out, definitely flour your cookie cutters. Once you've loaded up your
cookie sheet, you're gonna want to transfer this to your 350 degree
fahrenheit oven where the cookies will need to bake for about eight to 10
minutes or until they are just beginning to turn a light golden brown.
So while the cookies are cooling we can go ahead and make our animal cookie frosting. Now
this is a really simple frosting to make. You're going to need two cups of powdered sugar to start.
And we're going to add a tablespoon of meringue powder.
Basically what we're making here is of royal icing. It's going to firm up really
nicely and really hard on our cookies. Now some royal icing can be made with
egg whites, but since I'm pregnant I really prefer using the meringue
powder, and I've also found this way to be even easier than using egg whites.
So we're just going to whisk together our sugar and our meringue powder
And we'll also add three tablespoons of water
And 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract
We're going to switch over to our electric mixer in just a minute, but
because I don't want to send powdered sugar flying everywhere I'm going to
start by just working these ingredients together with my whisk until the
powdered sugar is nice and wet, and it's not gonna go flying when I use my mixer.
Now at this point, you are going to want to grab your electric mixer and you're
just going to want to beat this until it comes to soft peaks. I'll show you what
that looks like in just a second. This could take a few minutes.
So here you can see that we have soft peaks. When I lift the beaters out of the
icing, what happens is that peaks that form just fold over themselves pretty
much right away. They hold their shape a little bit. They're not completely
falling back into a puddle, but they're not stiff peaks. They're not holding
their shape. So this is as far as we want to go. We don't want this icing to get
too thick, otherwise it's going to be hard to dip our cookies. Now at this
point, I like to add some food coloring. This is totally optional.
My personal preference for these animal cookies is gel food coloring. I like to
use Americolor and this is electric pink. I'm just gonna stir a little bit in.
Once your cookies have cooled, let's go about decorating them. Now my favorite way to
do this is just to take the cookie. Hold it firmly by the base and just gently dip it into the surface of my icing.
This icing is going to start getting hard
really fast. So if you want to decorate your cookies with nonpareils, or
sprinkles, or anything like that, you're going to want to do it pretty quickly after dipping them.
Now one thing I love about using this kind of stiff royal
icing is that it helps preserve the outline of our cookie cutters. So you can
see every detail of your animal cookies.
And that is how you make these adorable a homemade animal cookies I hope you guys enjoy today's sweet,
simple, and from scratch recipe, and if you try this one out please let me know what you think.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
It's almost too cute to eat.
Adorable and delicious.
Hey if you guys enjoyed today's animal cookie recipe, I would really appreciate it if you would give me a thumbs
up. Make sure to subscribe, and hit that notification bell.
Also, if you enjoyed today's recipe video, here are a few others you might like as well.