Sometimes you just need a new spin on a classic! I have been making a lot of heart shaped cookies lately, and I have been just a trifle… bored with them, I think! Marbling the dough is an easy way to jazz up a cookie that looks awesome and really doesn’t take much more effort than you already need to make cookies in the first place. On top of that, it’s a very easy technique that anyone can handle- in fact, my three year old helped me make all the cookies featured in this post’s photos. And if my industrious preschooler can pull this off, you absolutely can too!
All of the sudden, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, isn’t it?! Love it or hate it, it comes every year. This time around, I am determined to love it. I’ll be doing a lot more baking than I usually might, filling local orders and shipping to people across the country, and so any kind of trick that makes cookies look visually interesting without taking a significant amount of time is something in which I’m very interested! Marbling the dough like this probably took me an extra five minutes from beginning to end, and that was with little fingers helping. I would think that if I didn’t have a pint-sized helper, I could have done this in three minutes flat.
You can use the same awesome recipe for sugar cookies that I always recommend. For convenience’s sake, I’ll have it at the bottom of this post as well. Once you have your dough mixed and ready to roll out according to the recipe steps, you should divide the dough into two equal halves. Use two to three drops of pink gel food coloring to tint one of the dough halves, mixing with a hand or stand mixer until the color is uniform throughout the dough.
Next, roll the dough into little balls, each about an inch and a half across. Working on a moderately floured surface, lay the dough balls out alternating between the pink and natural color. My recipe will generally make a rectangle eight balls wide and five balls down, with four of each color per line across. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough flat until there are no gaps left between the dough balls. You will get a bit of a wavy checkerboard pattern at this point.
Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into pieces around 3″ x 3″ and rearrange them. Roll them back into one cohesive flat shape about 1/4″ thick. After you have cut your shapes, you can re-roll the leftover dough by gently pressing all the leftover pieces together with your hands and then flattening it again with the rolling pin. Be careful not to knead the dough while you roll it out the second or third time. Refrigerte the baking sheet for at least ten minutes, and then bake according to the normal recipe- about 9 to 11 minutes.
Foolproof Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 3 cups all purpose flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup butter
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp almond extract
- 1 egg
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350.
- In bowl, mix together 3 cups of the flour and baking power. Set aside.
- In separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add in the extracts and the egg and beat until combined.
- Slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Dough will be crumbly.
- Press dough together with hands, and roll out on a well-floured surface. Cut shapes and place on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper.
- Refrigerate baking sheet for at least 10 minutes.
- Bake for 9-11 minutes, remove when cookie edges are just barely golden. Allow several minutes to cool on sheet before moving cookies to a rack.
