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.

Groundhog Day Cupcakes

Groundhog Day has always been a favorite movie of my husband. He was so inspired by it he bought a piano and taught himself how to play! Last year, on February 2nd, he started a ritual with our son where they watch the movie together. It was Jake's first time seeing it and he loved it so much that he asked to watch it again the next day. That day a tradition was born. Tomorrow evening they will watch the movie again and to commemorate the event I created a special Groundhog Day cupcake. I did my usual research on the web and I found a few recipes but none of them really looked much like an actual groundhog, so I created my own. I think Phil would be proud!

In case it doesn't come through in the photograph, it's a groundhog coming up out of it's snow covered burrow to see it's shadow. The cupcake is buttermilk chocolate-almond cake with vanilla cream cheese frosting (which is suppose to be snow). The little guy in the center is made from Tootsie rolls, regular size and mini chocolate chips, white candy melts, and cocoa. The cake crumbs around his head are suppose to be the dirt from his burrow. Yum!

One of my husband's favorite quotes from the movie:
Piano Teacher: Not bad... Mr. Connors, you say this is your first lesson?
Phil: Yes, but my father was a piano *mover*, so...

This just in! Phil Says Spring is Right Around the Corner! Straight from Gobbler's Knob, read Phil's official forecast here. I wonder if my cupcakes helped scare his shadow away? :-)

Jake's Pizza Cake

Tonight is my son's 11th birthday party and because I am the Birthday Fairy, last weekend I offered to make him any dessert he wanted. He originally asked for a cat cake, but the idea of cutting and eating a cake shaped like his favorite animal quickly caused him to change his mind. A few years ago I made him a kitty litter cake (I will never look at Tootsie Rolls quite the same way ever again!) and he asked me to make it again, but I refused. It didn't take long for him to run out of ideas. "Just make something cool," he said.

So later on in the week we discussed what would be served for dinner at his party and he decided on pizza (total shocker!) and that was when the idea came to me, "Pizza Cake". I searched the web briefly and didn't find anything other than dessert pizzas so I decided to make my own.

I'll do my best to describe how I made the cake but it was an experiment so please bear with me.

Pizza Cake

• 1 cake mix - any light colored favor prepared as the package recommends


• 1 container any flavor homemade or store bought icing


• 2 cups strawberry preserves (raspberry will do too but I would recommend buying seedless)


• Wilton Candy Melts 14 oz package in white, red, and light-brown


• 8-10 larger-sized malt balls ( I found these in the bulk food isle)


• Green icing


• 1/8 cup dried blueberries

1. Prepare the cake mix as directed making on a a time. Pour half the batter into a greased/floured 12" round cake pan (or smaller, depending on how large you want the cake to be) and bake it for about 20 min or until a toothpick comes out clear from the center. Repeat with the rest of the batter. Cool.

2. Cover a large oven proof cutting board or the bottom of a large cookiesheet with tinfoil or wax paper. Place one layer of the cake on top of the tin-foil. Frost the top of the bottom layer and place the top layer on top.

3. Over medium heat, simmer the preserves until runny. Add several drops of red food coloring (if desired) to make the color closer to that of tomato sauce. .

4. Spread the warm preserves over the cake, covering the top thoroughly but not so much that the cake is saturated. Chill the cake again for at least an hour so that the preserves re-congeal.

5. Now for the fun part - decorating!

- Sausage/Meatballs - with a very sharp knife, cut the malt balls in half, set aside

- Green Peppers - I am sure there's lots of great ways to do this but I bought Wilton's green icing and piped it onto a greased plate into small squares and rectangles. I then placed it into the freezer to firm-up.

- Pepperoni - Grease a small muffin tin and put one red candy-melt into each cup. Sprinkle about 1/2 teaspoon of grated brown candy-melts into each well. (I used a handheld cheese-grater to grate the candy-melts. See "cheese below for more details). Put the muffin tin under the broiler to melt the candies (only takes a minute or two). Once they are melted, mix the red and brown candy-melts together using a toothpick. Place into the freezer for about 10 minutes or until set. Once they are hard, flip the muffin pan over to release the "pepperoni" (I ended up hitting the back of the tin with knife to free the candy).

- Olives - get the dried blueberries ready, set aside.

- Cheese - I used a handheld cheese grater like this one to grate the white candy-melts over the top of the pizza. I worked my way over the top of the pizza until it had a good coating of cheese, but not so much that the "tomato sauce" didn't peek through. Then I used the brown candy melts around the perimeter the the "crust" -- I thought it looked more crust and slightly burnt, like a real pizza would. Finally I put the entire pizza in the oven under the broiler and watched it very closely. It only took 3 minutes for the "cheese" to melt - it even browned slightly!

After you take it out of the oven and while it is still warm, put your toppings on the pizza. I started with the sausage/meatballs, then the green pepper, followed by the olives and the pepperoni and then a little more cheese. Put it into the fridge to set again. For fun, put the pizza cake in a pizza box for a cute visual effect. Use a pizza cutter to slice it!