Extending the cookies

If you have a small family and a big recipe, or don't want to be eating shamrocks or Christmas trees for weeks after your holiday, here's one way to do it: cut a few out in each pattern, bake and freeze them. Of course you can freeze cookie dough too, but this way you only have to bake once.

My mom and my grandma were heavily into cut-out cookies. They each had large collections of metal and plastic cutters, for any and all occasions. My grandma even had a few very old animal-shaped cutters that had been made, I think for her grandmother, by someone you'd probably call a travelling tinker, who came along with tin snips and a soldering iron and put them together from her designs. I have the cutters now, safely put away-- from both respect for their age and concern over those badly discoloured strips of solder. (They look a lot like these.)

Both Mom and Grandma used the same fairly standard sugar cookie recipe, also passed down from one of the great-grandmothers, and called, naturally, Animal Cookies. When I was younger, I always thought the recipe must make an awful lot of cookies, because any time the cutters were out, the table and counters were just covered with baking. Later on I figured out that they must have at least quadrupled the recipe, because as written it doesn't really make that many cookies. (And may I note, my cookies do not turn out anything like these. Just so you know.)

But to the point: a few weeks ago, having been asked to make some cookies, I made a double batch of dough. I also had a bag of candy-coated pieces (the ones that melt in your mouth not in your hand). I cut out a bunch of balls (i.e. circles) and ice-cream cones for the requested occasion, and decorated them with some of the primary-coloured candies (before baking). I cut out some pigs (don't ask, I just liked the cutter), and gave them each several brown candy spots and a chocolate-chip eye. With what was left, I cut out a few shamrocks and put a green candy piece in the middle of each.

The balls and ice-cream cones got used for the intended purpose. The pigs and shamrocks went into the freezer.

The pigs came out when we needed a little extra touch for a family birthday dessert: I arranged them on a plate along with a couple of small containers of the leftover candy pieces (looked a bit like feeding troughs). (It wasn't meant to be a comment on anyone's appetite, I just thought they looked kind of fun.)

The shamrocks came out yesterday for St. Patrick's Day. Crayons and Ponytails (on March Break) added green icing and a few chocolate chips to the single green candy already baked into the middle of each--Crayons with a knife, and Ponytails with a fancier squirt tube. They also iced some arrowroot cookies with the extra icing. And that was St. Paddy's Day dessert.

Worked for me.