Ultimate Shortbread Cookie Recipe

This week I was asked to create a special cookie for a very unique birthday. The company I work for is re-branding the products they provide. To celebrate the official "birth" of the new name and brand, and I was asked to created 70 cookies with the new 360 logo. The cookies were to be shared with everyone at work after the formal introduction of the new 360 name. Today was the big day and everyone loved them.

For those who asked here is the recipe I used for the shortbread:

• 1 cups of sugar
• 1 cups of butter (at room temperature)
• 1 teaspoons of vanilla
• 1 eggs
• 3 cups of flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Cream the butter and sugar. Add vanilla and eggs. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients together. With the mixer on low/medium speed, slowly add dry ingredients to the wet, being sure to scrape down the bowl frequently. Chill for 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Roll dough on well floured surface to 1/4" thickness (I highly recommend using rolling pin bands to help keep the height of the dough consistant). If dough starts to stick to your rolling pin or won't roll out well, chill again. Cut out desired shapes (I used a 4" cookie cutter) and place onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 9-12 min. Cookies should not be brown when you remove them from the oven.

This recipe yields approximately 1 1/2 to 2 dozen 4" cookies. 4 batches yielded a little more than 6 dozen 4" cookies.

I wanted to make sure the "360" lettering was an exact match for the font that Marketing had given me. To do this, I printed out a full-size version of the text in Word and then traced it on top of a large piece of heavy grade aluminium that I cut out of the bottom of a disposable brownie pan. Once I made the impression, I used a pen to retrace "360" into the aluminum over and over, until a clear negative image appeared on the bottom of the stamp. To mark the cookies, I tried a few approaches. First I stamped the cookies while they were raw. This didn't work because as they baked the stamp would just disappear. Next, I stamped them right after they came out of the oven. This worked pretty well but I had to work fast so that I wouldn't get burnt. Ouch! The last idea I came up with was to use create a stamp pad by saturating a new sponge with dark green concentrated food coloring. I'd pat the stamp against the stamp pad and then stamp the cookie. This worked great! Next time I'll use a lighter color so that it doesn't' bleed through the frosting.

For frosting, I made a batch of royal icing (I used the recipe that came with the Wilton Meringue Powder) and used lemon yellow, leaf green, and moss green to get the right color. Boy was that hard! It took a lot of "a little of this" and a "blob of that" to get the color to come together. Tip: Be sure to scrape down the bowl a lot during the coloring process. I found big pockets of frosting that was a little dry and wasn't mixing together into the batch. Nothing like a big pocket of white frosting to lighten my apple green frosting. Gr! Once I had the color down, I transferred the frosting into a air-tight container and covered it promptly. I then prepared a pastry bag with a #1 tip and filled it with about 1/4 cup of frosting.

I slowly outlined each cookie's 360 stamp and also created a circle of frosting around the edge. I let them dry for about an hour. I then took the left over frosting, added about 1 teaspoon of clear vanilla to it and about 1/3 cup of warm water. I poured the frosting into plastic bottles and along with a tiny paint brush, filled in the green color all over the cookie, except for inside the 360. I let them try over night. The next day I repeated the process with just white icing and filled in numbers. They dried in about 2 hours.

For packaging, I to put the cookies into CD envelopes that were lined with wax paper and sealed the back with a 360 logo sticker. This made handing out the cookies very easy.