Yesterday while at work, while on Facebook (but of course), I noticed my boss’s birthday had passed the prior week. My co-worker and I had planned to do something special for his birthday: he’s a HUGE Saskatchewan Roughriders fan, so we thought it would be cute to fill his office with green balloons, streamers, treats, etc. Even though we were almost a week late, we decided “better late than never!” and headed out to the party store on our lunch break to pick up our supplies.
I decided to also grab a few baking things while we were out so that I could make some cute Riders-themed cookies. I scored these awesome Wilton football-themed cookie cutters at Michael’s, as well as some black decorating gel to use on the cookies. I already had what I needed at home to make the actual cookies and the colored royal icing, so after dinner I got to work!
Ingredients:
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 1 1/3 cups sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
Instructions:
- Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt
- In a separate bowl, beat the butter until smooth
- Add sugar to butter and continue beating until mixture is light and fluffy
- Add eggs to butter/sugar one at a time, mixing between each, then add vanilla
- Add in flour mixture to butter mixture and mix until just combined
- Put dough between two sheets of plastic wrap and form into a rough disc shape
- Refrigerate for one hour (you can make your royal icing while you wait - see this recipe!)
- After dough has been chilled, preheat oven to 350ºF and line two baking sheets with parchment paper
- Roll your dough and cut out using cookie cutters
- (If, during any step, dough becomes too sticky, this means it has gotten too warm - chill in fridge for a few minutes to firm up)
- After cookie shapes have been cut, place in fridge for 15 minutes to help cookies keep their shapes when baking
- Bake the cookies for 9 - 11 minutes, checking every couple of minutes too make sure they're not too brown. Take them out just as the edges start to turn a light golden brown
- Let cool, then decorate with your royal icing colors!
(If you don’t know how to make royal icing for decorating cookies, or just want to try a new recipe that doesn’t use raw eggs or expensive meringue powder, try my corn syrup-based cookie icing recipe, here)
After the cookies have cooled, I started by outlining the cookies with piping-consistency royal icing, then filling them in with flood-consistency icing (brown for the footballs, green for the helments and jerseys). Let the base colors harden (took about 15-20 minutes for me), then start drawing on your numbers, logos, accents etc with your accent colors (I used white and black to match the Riders logo). Have fun! ♡
