Fall Cookies

Ok, so it’s a little ‘late’ for fall. But technically, it isn’t winter for another few weeks.

A few weeks ago a friend invited a small group over to her house to do a cookie decorating event. I volunteered to provide the icing…and the cookies. One of the women brought along her two young sons and it was fun to show the older one how to mix icing and then how to marble colours. Good times were had by all and we all left with a sizeable stack of decorated sugar cookies.

One of the things I did want to make was maple cookies. The recipe is a Martha Stewart one that I have used for years. It’s almost like  a shortbread – rich, buttery and full of maple flavour. My original idea was to ice them with maple icing tinted in fall colours and marble the colors, just like a maple leaf. But then I thought – why not marble coloured dough?

I wound up testing this out with sugar cookie dough and they actually look pretty cool:

I tinted four balls of dough with food colouring. Note: it is MUCH EASIER to tint the dough during the mixing of the dough rather than after. I found that to really integrate the colour into the dough made the final product a bit tough.

Balls of coloured dough.

After tinting the dough, I mixed the balls together. I pulled random pieces off and stuck them in to create a less uniform look. I then rolled out the dough. You can see the colour distribution of each ball of dough.

Marbled dough rolled out and being cut.

Here we have the finished product: a marbled maple leaf cookie!

Voila!

And now to try this with the actual maple cookie recipe! I suppose there’s really no stopping you from colouring the dough of cookies to match seasonal themes – red and green shortbread, anyone?