The Flour Pot Cookie project

Since I took a break during the schools holidays, it was the best time to experiment some recipes. It was also a good time to rope the kids in to do some baking.

This time, we decided to bake and decorate cookies based on The Flour Pot Cookie book. The cookie recipe is quite straightforward. What makes a sugar cookie interesting is how you decorate it.

We got the dough done. The recipe requires the dough to be stored in the refrigerator for at least an hour before use as this will make it firm and not sticky. I just put in the fridge until I made the royal icing as my kids couldn't wait to cut out their cookies.

Since it was sticky, I just added flour to the dough in order to roll it out properly. Then it was my kids' turn to have a go with the cookie cutters.

We baked the coookies for about 15mins and here they are ready for decoration.

We decided to use only two colour: pink and white to decorate the cookies.

Once the royal icing dried rock hard, we put them in the jar. The cookies were yum and I thought we had so many cookies and it was going to last for some time. But boy was I wrong! They were all gone in two days. :)

It was a fun project that we all enjoyed tremendously!

Crispy, chewy, chocolatey cookies

During school holidays, I usually will sign up my kids for baking classes. This time, we decided to do some baking together at home.

We decided to bake chocolate chip cookies for tea.

As usual, all three of my kids wanted to do everything... from sieving the flour to tasting the dough. Two eggs were used, so each one had the chance to crack open one. Three of them and two eggs and each cracked open one. That doesn't add up, does it?

Well, within the first 10mins of the process, my second gal got upset with her brother and left. So it was the two of them. These cookies are simple to make and time taken is less than 20 minutes.

When it was time to scoop the dough onto the baking tray, the two of them lost interest and off they went to play badminton ... abandoning me to finish up the cookies.

I must say that the dough itself was tasty and the cookies turned out very crispy and chewy and chocolatey. Yummmm!

Different kind of baking

Weekends seem to be the busiest time for me. My friend Sakthi wanted to make some cookies for Deepavali (this weekend). She wanted two cookies and we decided on ghee biscuits and pineapple jam tarts.

Since we baked them, I decided to write about it in my blog. Armed with all the ingredients, my daughter and I went over to Sakthi's place. I decided to make my cookies here as well.
We started off with the ghee biscuits. We finished making them quite fast. It was fast because we had six pairs of hand; sakthi and her two gals, her aunt, my daughter and myself.

The pineapple tarts were a bit tricky cos it needed a lot more work. We had to press out the dough and then roll it over the jam. The kids did most of them and they were much faster than the adults.

In fact, the gals enjoyed making it so much that they were seeing the $$$$ sign by the end of it all. They wanted to start a business doing jam tarts. They started making plans to market it and the whole works on how to set up their business.They were quite disappointed when we told them that they can only do this during the school holidays.

So much for the Deepavali cookies...

I also baked two cakes; a birthday cake for Chitra's mom and a company's 10th anniversary cake.
I found the anniversary cake very challenging. They wanted the company building on the cake. This is my first attempt at constructing a building out of cake. I covered the cake with fondant and then iced it.

The cake had an indent in the middle. Even with dowell rods, the building was slanting a bit.
Decorating this cake was not as easy as I thought, but one thing I know is that I gave it my best shot. Maybe next time I need more time to work on projects like these.