I don't follow football super closely these days (I'm more of a baseball kind of gal), but it wasn't always that way. In the mid-90s, many a Sunday I could be found jumping around the living room, yelling at the TV, cheering on my beloved San Francisco 49ers. I remember those afternoons vividly because my brother and I had fencing practice at 4:30pm every Sunday, and we always begged Mom and Dad to let us watch one more down before we had to run out of the house. As a kid, I idolized Steve Young and Jerry Rice, I despised the Cowboys, and I thought George Seifert was infallible. Until he became a Panther, that is. This year, for the first time in almost a decade, the Niners made me feel like a kid again. So even though they didn't make it to the Super Bowl, I'm excited to be seeing red and gold again.
Now then, that's enough nostalgia for a Sunday night...
My classmates had a some people over for the game, and in keeping with the theme, I decided to make football-shaped sugar cookies. I usually avoid sugar cookies because after the first tray, I inevitably grow weary of the "roll, cut, decorate, bake, repeat" routine. Also, the nagging perfectionist in me hates it when the cookies get deformed during the transfer stage between cutting board and cookie sheet.
But this was special, so I decided to bust out my rolling pin and give it a whirl. I planned to frost the cookies with chocolate icing and use white icing to draw on the laces, but what about cutting the cookies into footballs? I thought about buying a biscuit cutter and pinching the sides to make a football shape, but that would have require advance planning and a trip to the cooking store. Ex-nay. Then I considered cutting a football-shaped template and using it as a guide, but I couldn't be bothered to find an appropriately clean piece of cardboard. Ex-nay. So... what's left? Free-hand, of course! A little knife work is good for keeping nimble fingers, I say.
Here is a drawn recap of how I cut all those footballs, courtesy of my brand new Wacom Bamboo tablet! First, I cut circles of dough using a coffee mug, then I lightly scored each circle with a cross. I used the score lines as a guide to cut symmetrical shapes (well, almost symmetrical), then I loaded up the baking sheet and popped those suckers in the oven!
After the cookies cooled, I frosted them with chocolate icing, then drew on the laces using white icing. If I had to do these cookies again, I think I would have rolled the dough a little bit thicker and baked them a little bit less, because I like my sugar cookies a little but soft, but to be perfectly honest, these were more about the looks. So how *did* they look? See for yourself! Here are the results, in full HD!
And here's the cookie recipe, courtesy of the Flour Bakery Cookbook, as well as an icing recipe that I made up:
Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup confectioners sugar
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup chocolate chips
Directions
Cream together the butter and granulated sugar for about 5 minutes using a stand mixer (or 10 minutes by hand with a spoon, like me!). Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt until well mixed. Slowly blend the flour mixture into the butter-sugar mixture and then mix just until the flour mixture is totally incorporated and the dough is evenly mied.
Scrape the dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap and wrap the dough in the plastic wrap, pressing down to form a disk about 8-inches in diameter and 1-inch thick. Refrigerate dough for about 1 hour, or until it firms up enough to roll out (I did mine overnight and it warm up on the counter before rolling out).
Preheat oven to 350 degress.
Roll out your dough, cut out your shapes, and place them on a cookie sheet. Bake for 12 minutes, or until the edges turn brown but the centers are still pale. Let the cookies cool for 30 minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer to a wire rack.
While the cookies are cooling, mix together confectioners sugar and milk. Remove 1/4 of the icing and set aside. Melt the chocolate chips, and mix into the larger portion of the icing. Using a pastry bag filled with the chocolate icing, draw the outline of a football on each cookie, then fill in with more chocolate icing. Once the chocolate icing hardens, draw on the football laces using the remaining white icing.
