Frosting & a Cookie Photo Shoot

[mishalak]

And now I have pictures of my recent cookie making adventures. They look very tasty and I can confirm they taste even better. I was dumbfounded that I made some of these. In particular the cookies that I slathered in orange butter cream frosting were so good they could have come from a high end bakery. Perfect balance, sweet enough to satisfy completely with just one cookie but not so sweet that I felt like I was about to go into sugar shock.

Orange Buttercream Frosting
¾ cups butter (1½ sticks)
¾ cups confectioners' sugar
½ tablespoon orange zest (about one orange worth)
1½ tablespoons orange juice
1½ tablespoons milk

Beat butter in a bowl, preferably with an electric mixer using a paddle attachment at medium speed. Beat until fluffy, this should take about a minute if the butter is at room temperature. Stop the mixer and add a half cup of the confectioners' sugar, beat it slowly until fully incorporated. Repeat until you have added all the sugar. Increase speed to medium again and beat until very smooth, this should take three minutes or longer. I mean it!

Add the orange ingredients and beat a bit before adding the milk to avoid any possibility of curdling, however slight. Then add the milk and beat a bit more. Stop and scrape the bowl and beater with a spatula to make sure everything gets throughly mixed. You may have to repeat the scraping and mixing stage several times. Once totally mixed beat briskly until the mixture is rather fluffy, this could take four minutes or longer.

The resulting frosting will have a pleasant pale orange color with flecks of darker colors in it. If you wanted it to be totally uniform you could try making this in a food processor, but I've never done it. This makes enough to easily frost a dozen and a half cookies or a dozen if put on very thick.

Not the greatest picture ever as I took the picture under some halogen lights that gave a bit of a blue cast I had trouble getting rid of.  This is one of the orange buttercream frosted cookies.  I hope there is not too much moisture in the frosting, I've never frosted cookies with a mixture containing real butter rather than shortening.  But it tasted very, very good.  If there is trouble down the road I might try clarified butter or something, I do not particularly want to go back to shortening.

As you can see I decided to do a few cookies in pink. I added just two drops of standard red food coloring to half of the frosting. Nice color. And I played around while taking pictures of the cookies with various patterns.

And here is a picture of how the majority of my cookies came out looking. The one in red sugar on the upper left is an example of what happens when the dough is rolled a bit thinner. They come out much more crisp and do not puff up or spread as much. It was about three quarters the thickness of its brothers.

Finally this is how my ibex cookies dusted with cocoa powder and sugar came out. They are quite tasty, though I think the cocoa powder still is not sticking quite right. I might try confectioners' sugar instead of regular sugar. When I dusted this cookie it was nearly totally covered in my mixture of sugar and plain cocoa powder. As you can see the cocoa pulled towards the sugar grains giving a, not totally unpleasant but unexpected, spotted appearance.

Questions, comments?