I decided to try something a little different with these and mainly used
palm sugar rather than caster. I got it a little while back from the Asian supermarket nearest my house. I sliced the sugar cake up finely with a serrated knife. About 2/3 of my sugar was that, for the remainder I used dark brown sugar. I decided to not mix that into the mixture too thoroughly to see how it looked.
As well as squirrels I dug out a couple of other cutters, a nice moon and cat arching its back. It was also another fine opportunity to use the fancy rainbow sugar She bought for me.
We made the dough one day and left it in the fridge over night. It was pretty sticky and soft when we made it but it firmed up well when chilled.
Having the brown sugar only partially mixed gave the dough a cool wood grain sort of effect. I'm definately going to try something similar again some time because I'm sure with a little tinkering you could make it look super cool.
As the dough warmed a little bit it became very sticky. I had to pop it back into the fridge a couple of times and flour everything really well as you can see here.
My first batch spread quite a bit which was a little disapointing. Strangely the next two batches were much more well behaved. I'd chilled the sheets of cookies really well before putting them in the oven which is supposed to help stop spreading. I did a bit of reading and it seems that the finer the sugar the more likely cookies are to spread (excluding icing sugar which has corn flour in it which helps counteract the spread) I think for that reason caster may have been better. Palm sugar certainly gave them a great taste though and apprently has some health benefits. The strangest thing to me though was the texture. As we mixed them up I queried the amount of baking powder and soda; I was suprised how much was called for. They turned out pretty cakey because of all those leavening agents rather than the crisp, dense cookies I expected to get having read the name of the recipe. Regardless, they were delicious, just know they're not your typical sugar cookie!
As well as squirrels I dug out a couple of other cutters, a nice moon and cat arching its back. It was also another fine opportunity to use the fancy rainbow sugar She bought for me.
We made the dough one day and left it in the fridge over night. It was pretty sticky and soft when we made it but it firmed up well when chilled.
Having the brown sugar only partially mixed gave the dough a cool wood grain sort of effect. I'm definately going to try something similar again some time because I'm sure with a little tinkering you could make it look super cool.
As the dough warmed a little bit it became very sticky. I had to pop it back into the fridge a couple of times and flour everything really well as you can see here.
My first batch spread quite a bit which was a little disapointing. Strangely the next two batches were much more well behaved. I'd chilled the sheets of cookies really well before putting them in the oven which is supposed to help stop spreading. I did a bit of reading and it seems that the finer the sugar the more likely cookies are to spread (excluding icing sugar which has corn flour in it which helps counteract the spread) I think for that reason caster may have been better. Palm sugar certainly gave them a great taste though and apprently has some health benefits. The strangest thing to me though was the texture. As we mixed them up I queried the amount of baking powder and soda; I was suprised how much was called for. They turned out pretty cakey because of all those leavening agents rather than the crisp, dense cookies I expected to get having read the name of the recipe. Regardless, they were delicious, just know they're not your typical sugar cookie!
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