Baseball Cookies !

Sadly, I was not able to participate in the Daring Baker's challenge this month. So I thought I'd post on a different kind of baker's challenge instead. To mark the end of our Little League season this year, I created a baseball cookie for each of the kids on my son's team.

I used this great recipe that I found for cut out cookies: No Fail Sugar Cookies, which originally came from Kitchengifts.com. I made giant five-inch diameter cookies- using a tupperware bowl as my cut-out tool. I use KitchenGift's tip for rolling out dough without the mess: Rather than wait for your cookie dough to chill, take the freshly made dough and place a glob between two sheets of parchment paper. Roll it out to the desired thickness, then place the dough and paper on a cookie sheet and pop it into the refrigerator. Continue rolling out your dough between sheets of paper until you have used it all. By the time you are finished, the first batch will be completely chilled and ready to cut. Reroll leftover dough and repeat the process. Add added bonus is that you are not adding any additional flour to your cookies. This process works WONDERFULLY!

Martha Stewart's Royal Icing works really well for decorator cookies. I made the whole batch and then divided it up into 3 tupperware bowls. Place the lids on each until ready to use or they'll begin to harden. With icing tub #1, I piped all of the edges on first and let those dry a little bit. Then I thinned out icing tub #1 slightly and used it to flood the centers. If you give it enough time, it hardens nicely.

To make nice, even arcs for the stitching on the baseball, I used the edge of the same tupperware that I used to cut out the cookies to make impressions.

With icing tub #2, I mixed in 1 bottle of red food coloring to get a nice dark red color. If you use too little, you'll end up with magenta stitches. Boys don't like magenta. Then I piped red icing into the impressions, and also added the stitches.

Icing tub #3 was mixed with blue food coloring. Each cookie was personalized with a name and a number.

I made nice, thick 5-inch cookies... and I ended up with about 18. It's nice to have a couple extra ones because it's inevitable that one of them will get messed up at some point during the decorating process.

If you've got 24 hours to let these dry completely, you'll end up with icing that hardens nicely. I was in a bit of a rush, so I used a table fan to dry them today (and that worked just fine too.) Each cookie was slipped into its own quart-sized baggie and they were good to go.

The final game was a tie (happy kids all around!) The boys loved their cookies. And they especially enjoyed the fact that they were personalized. The moms and dads who snuck bites from their kid's cookies noted how delicious they were. And many of the parents asked me where I purchased the cookies :)

The cookie recipe can be found HERE.
The royal icing recipe can be found HERE.

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