Snowmen Faces Cookies, excerpted from Christmas Cookies: More than 60 recipes for adorable festive bakes by Hannah Miles (Ryland Peters & Small). Photography by Steve Painter.
There is nothing as cozy as a day spent baking in the holiday season—filling the house with the scent of warm, sweet dough and producing delicious treats that raise a smile even before a single bite is taken out of them!
The book features tips on how to host your Christmas “cookie exchange” from clever ways to display bakes to sending out fun invitations, plus packaging ideas for gifting home-baked treats.
Decorating hints and tips and basic recipes follow, providing information on all the tools you need to bake more than 60 different cookies, from Jolly Santas, Snowmen Faces, Coconut Snowballs, Frosted Fir Cones, and Hot Chocolate Cookie Cups to Reindeer Pretzel Cookies and Meringue Snowmen.
A joyous collection of seasonal baking recipes for all the family to enjoy.
Christmas Cookies: More than 60 recipes for adorable festive bakes is available at Amazon.com and Indigo.ca.
Snowmen Faces
‘Do you want to build a snowman?’ So the popular movie song goes… Well, if you do, then why not make these friendly snowy faces! The cookies are made with marzipan and cocoa and taste scrumptious.
200 g/7 oz. natural marzipan, broken into small pieces 90 g/¾ stick butter, softened
100 g/1 cup ground almonds 100 g/¾ cup self-raising/self-rising flour, sifted, plus extra for dusting
40 g/scant ½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
350 g/2½ cups fondant icing/confectioners’ sugar, sifted orange and black food colouring gels
7-cm/2 ¾-inch round cutter 2 baking sheets, lined with baking parchment piping/pastry bag, fitted with a small round nozzle/tip cocktails sticks/toothpicks
Makes 20
Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F) Gas 4.
Cream together the marzipan and butter using a hand-held electric whisk or stand mixer until it becomes paste-like. Add the almonds, flour and cocoa, and beat to a smooth dough. It should be soft but not sticky, so add a little more flour if needed.
On a flour-dusted surface, roll out the dough to 5 mm/¼ inch thick and cut out 20 circles, re-rolling the dough as necessary. Place the cookies on the baking sheet, leaving space between them. Bake in the preheated oven for 10–15 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the baking sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
To ice the cookies mix 300 g/2 cups of the icing/confectioners’ sugar with about 2 tablespoons of water until you have a thick icing. Spoon one-third into the piping/pastry bag and pipe a circle around the edge of each cookie. Leave to set for 10 minutes. Return any icing to the bowl and add a little more water so that the icing is thin enough to flow. Flood the circles with a spoonful of icing (see page 18) and leave to set.
Mix the remaining 50 g/½ cup icing/confectioners’ sugar with a little water and mix in a few drops of orange food colouring. Using a cocktail stick/toothpick, place a line of orange icing in the centre of each cookie to make a carrot nose. When you have completed all the noses, add a few drops of black food colouring to the orange icing, to make it completely black. Using a second cocktail stick/toothpick, place dots of black icing onto the cookies for the eyes and mouth. Leave to set.
The cookies will store for up to 5 days in an airtight container.
Excerpted from Christmas Cookies: More than 60 recipes for adorable festive bakes by Hannah Miles (Ryland Peters & Small). Copyright © 2020. Design and photographs copyright © by Ryland Peters & Small 2020.