Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make my favorite fall themed sugar cookies.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Sam here and as somebody who loves the complicated side of baking,
I've dedicated myself to developing and sharing the
best and simplest versions of recipes that you might have been intimidated by
in the past. Today I am going to show you how to fit a
whole pumpkin into a sugar cookie, or something like that.
I'm sure you're familiar with the sugar cookie dough that you can buy at the
supermarket that has those cute little designs inside.
Well today I'm going to show you how to do that and make a really simple pumpkin
design. Now to get started you're going to need a large mixing bowl.
We're going to combine one cup of softened unsalted butter,
One and a half cup of granulated sugar
One large room temperature egg
And a teaspoon of vanilla extract.
We'll cream these ingredients together really well. You'll want to use an
electric mixer for this step. You could definitely use a stand mixer. Today I'm just using my hand mixer.
(Sad music playing)
Once this is nice and creamy and well combined we'll set it aside,
and in a separate bowl we are going to combine our dry ingredients. We'll start
with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour,
Add a teaspoon of baking powder, and 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and we'll just whisk these together.
Now we'll just gradually add this to our wet ingredients stirring on low speed until it's completely combined.
The dough might seem a little bit crumbly in the beginning, but just keep mixing until it all comes together.
The dough is looking pretty good. I'm just going to scrape the sides and
bottom of the bowl with a spatula because I want to make sure there are no
pockets of flour hiding in there and I want to make sure the dough is well combined.
So now we need to divide our dough so
that we can color it to make our pumpkins.
You are going to want to separate the dough and put three quarters of it in
one bowl, and leave one quarter of it behind. This
is what we are going to be coloring orange. This is a little less than one
cup of dough, a little bit more than 3/4 cup of dough. If you want to measure it
and if you're using grams it's about 220 grams.
We'll also measure out about a tablespoon of dough.
You can take that from either place and this is going to be our pumpkin stem or pumpkin vine.
I love using gel food coloring because
it's so vibrant. So today I'm going to be using
Americolor gel. I'm using orange to color my pumpkin.
We want a nice vibrant orange color.
We'll color this dough green and I'm just using a little bit of mint green food coloring.
So now let's make our pumpkins. I'm going to scoop this dough onto a clean surface
and divide it about evenly into two parts.
It does not need to be exact. Now I'm just going to use my hands to form this
into a log that kind of resembles a pumpkin, which
basically just means it needs to be round.
Basically I'm just rolling out a carrot. I usually roll my pumpkins to be about 3
4 inch wide by about a half inch tall.
If you find that your dough is too sticky to work with then just go ahead
and pop it in the fridge for about 15, 20, even 30 minutes, until it's easy for you to manage with your bare hands.
I find that when I make the dough with
my stand mixer, because it's so powerful, sometimes it makes the butter a little
bit warmer than I like it to be, which can make the dough a little bit
stickier and harder to handle. Now we'll make an indent where we're
going to place the pumpkin stem. To do this I like to use a long wooden skewer,
but you could use a knife or even a ruler instead if you don't happen have a skewer.
And we'll just gently make that indent.
And as you're doing this it might flatten the bottom of your pumpkin a
little bit, which is perfect because that's how pumpkins are shaped.
And this is where our vine is going to go. Now this is where the green dough
that you just prepared comes in. Now I've found that it's easier to work
with this dough in pieces.Sso we're just going to take a small bit of the dough
and roll it until you have a nice thin strip.
Like I said, you don't want to make it
too long because then it breaks really easily you want to make this easy on yourself.
So once you've formed your pumpkins you are going to want to transfer these to
the freezer where you can leave them uncovered for
at least 30 minutes. You want them to be nice and firm before
you go any further. If it's not too warm in my kitchen I'll usually leave my
remaining cookie dough out at room temperature.
Sometimes I'll cover it with a piece of plastic wrap, but you want this to be
nice and pliable. So after 30 minutes go ahead and grab your pumpkins from the
freezer, and we're just going to work the rest of our cookie dough around them.
I'll take about half of my cookie dough.
Work it out to be the length of my pumpkin.
Make a little indent.
So it's sticking a little bit so i'm going to use my spatula.
Just press that firmly into your cookie dough.
And then just work the cookie dough around it.
Of course you can add more from your bowl as needed,
but when all said and done you want this log to be about one and a half inches in diameter.
Even though our dough is nice and cold and that stem should be sturdy
I'm always kind of gentle placing the cookie dough around it.
Now you want your pumpkins to be right in the center of your cookies so be
mindful of that while you're forming the dough around them.
Get that excess pumpkin out of there.
Roll this to be nice and even.
Now I have a little bit more pumpkin than I can cover here so i'm just going to trim the edges.
I'd rather trim off the excess rather than have too thin of a layer
Now carefully wrap each of these logs in plastic wrap.
The worst part about this cookie dough is it's going to need to chill in the
refrigerator for at least four hours. Now to keep the cookie dough
from forming a flat bottom, from sitting on your refrigerator shelf,
I like to keep mine on a plush kitchen towel.
I do have some cookie dough in the fridge already that I prepped last night
so you don't have to wait 4 hours with me.
Before you take your dough out of the refrigerator you do want to preheat your
oven and make sure it's fully preheated to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now we can go ahead and cut our cookies into about 1/4 inch thick slices.
It's really awkward for me to cut it this way but I'm trying to make it so you can see what the inside looks like.
Are you guys ready to see what this looks like?
The first one's going to be a little bit messy, but we're going to bake it anyway.
Okay you saw that one so i'm cutting the rest of them normally.
Space these cookies at least two inches apart on a parchment paper lined baking
sheet, and we're going to take them over to our
preheated oven where they will bake for about 10 minutes or until they're light
golden brown color around the edges. So this one's a little bit funky looking
because that was our first one, but check out the rest of them.
Perfect pumpkins. And that is how you fit a pumpkin in a sugar cookie.
I hope you guys enjoyed today's video. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
So much better than the ones you get at the store.