Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Vanilla Alphabet Cookies

You know I've got a fetish for baking gear, right?

So when Frieling offered me a cookie pan to make alphabet cookies, of course I had to try it. It makes numbers, too. So, three dozen cookies - 26 letters plus six numbers - per pan.

But they're not giant cookies. They're thin and sort of delicate. So you can easily eat a whole word's worth.

Since I wasn't sure what sort of cookie dough was best for the pan, I decided to use a recipe from the company's website. Turns out that the cookie dough was thicker than cake batter but not quite as thick as a drop cookie. Other doughs might work, too. I have some experimenting to do.

Right now, I'm thinking I'd like to make some sort of cheese crackers with this pan.

The tricky part was figuring out the best way to fill the letters and scrape off the excess without also scraping up cookie dough. It was just a matter of making a few pans full to figure out the best technique.

Speaking of a few pans, the recipe on the website was for making one pan full of cookies, but I wanted to make more. And, the recipe called for half of an egg, which is a little silly. So, I quadrupled the recipe. That let me make 5 full pans full of cookies, plus a little extra.

The other slightly tricky thing was cooking time. Since the cookies were soooo thin, they went from nicely browned to a little more browned pretty quickly. I didn't actually burn any, but thirty seconds made a difference.

Vanilla Cookies
Recipe by Frieling
For one sheet of 26 letters and 10 numbers

1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 cup melted butter
1/2 egg
1/4 cup flour
1 tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon melted butter to grease the pan

Preheat oven to 320°F and grease the pan with the melted butter.

Grease pan and refrigerate for 5 minutes (cookie dough will stick better to the mold when cold).

Mix all ingredients (except the butter for greasing the pan) in a small bowl.

Fill the pan using a dough scraper to remove excess batter.

Bake for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown.

Cool for a few minutes. then softly tap the pan on a kitchen towel to loosen cookies and drop them off onto a plate.

Decorate to your liking. I used powdered sugar, but they'd be nice dipped in chocolate, too.
Yum