Spritz-ed Sugar Cookies

I just love using my spritz gun – It makes such cute little shapes, without all the hassle of rolling out the dough, cutting, re-rolling, re-cutting… I’m sure you can understand how tedious that can become, especially in big batches. I don’t often do “shaped” cookies, because usually you have to sacrifice flavor in order to accomidate design, but I thought it could be a fun activity, and a good way to test out a recipe I might not otherwise consider.

So I whipped out my In the Garden of Vegan cookbook and set off creating “Mum’s Sugar Cookies.” I shot out a tray full of cute little dough-flowers, and they went into the oven like so:

Cute, huh? And so well defined! With high hopes, I set the timer and wandered off to clean the counters and such (I don’t cook very neatly.) 15 minutes I returned… and pulled this out of the oven…

It looks like someone set off an atomic bomb in there, they’re completely leveled! What happened?? It couldn’t be the recipe, these are supposed to be tried and true… and even they aren’t all perfect, I can’t imagine that they would be so far off…

So I threw the remaining dough in the fridge, and sulked in front on my laptop, blog-hopping as usual. Then, after the first dozen blogs or so, it hit me: I’m a moron. Clearly, they spread so much because there was too much fat, but I’m positive I used the correct amount… Somehow, I have a feeling in my bones that I skimped on the flour. By about a cup. I bet that could do it.

I retrieved my exiled dough from the chill chest and mixed in another handful of flour. Repeating the same process of using the spritz gun and resetting the oven, I waited anxiously. In the end, I was rewarded for my [relative] patience:

It worked! Now, however, I had wasted about half of the dough to the nuclear explosion effect, and there was no way I would have enough cookies to share around. Back to work making a second batch to suppliment, and this time I made sure I used the proper amount of flour.

For decoration, I made a simple confectioner’s sugar glaze, and mixed in 2 teaspoons of lemon juice for interest. I must say, that little lemony flavoring made all the difference. Being plain sugar cookies, I was worried that kids might find them boring or bland, but they were gobbled up as if I had put crack in them! ….Which of course I didn’t. [Shifty look]

With one and a half batches, it made a whole field of flowers! I chose to mix in three different colors for the petals and top them with colored sugar, but they were all the same flavor. As an interesting side note, I did notice that for some inexplicable reason, red was the most popular. Heh, who knows, right? I was lucky that they were consumed so enthusiastically, because this amount would have taken my household about a decade to finish off. One little girl even took ten for herself! If you find yourself in need of quick, cute kid-pleasers… Don’t make these. The icing alone took me atleast two and a half hours to complete, but maybe if you had someone to help or weren’t nearly as obsessive as me, it could be a bit simpler.