How to Make Animal Cookies

Hey everyone, Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I’m showing you how to make frosted animal cookies.
These iced animal cookies are so much better than
anything you can buy at the store. I
actually found this recipe a couple
weeks ago when I was raiding my
grandmother’s old cookbooks and I had to
try it out. This one actually came
clipped from a super old magazine. I made
a few adjustments to make the flavor and
the texture of the cookie just right.
I think you’re going to love it. Now to get
started, the first thing you want to do
is get your oven preheated to 350
degrees Fahrenheit. Next you are going to
need 12 tablespoons or one and a half
sticks of unsalted butter and you want
this to be softened. We’re gonna add this
to a large bowl.
We’re also going to add one and a half cups of granulated sugar.
And now use an electric mixer just to beat the butter and sugar together until they’re nicely combined.
Now we’re going to add two large eggs.
A teaspoon of salt
A teaspoon of vanilla extract
And finally I recommend adding a 1/2
teaspoon of princess emulsion. Now what
this is, is it’s a flavor it’s like an
almond, lemon, citrusy flavor and it
really really reminds me of the taste of
traditional animal cookies, and in fact I
know. I didn’t figure this out on my own.
The lady who works at my local cake shop
actually told me about it, and it really
makes a huge difference in these animal
cookies. Now if you can’t get your hands
on it
don’t panic. These cookies are still
gonna be great with the vanilla extract.
You can even use a little bit of almond
extract for flavor, but this really adds
a great flavor. I found this at my local
cake shop, but also my local Walmart has
it. So look around you might find it easier than you think. We’re gonna add a half teaspoon of this.
Use your electric mixer just to beat everything together now until everything is nicely combined.
The next thing you need is four and a half cups of
all-purpose flour. You can also use
unbleached flour. I’ve tried both of
these flours in this recipe and either works great. We’re going to gradually stir this into our butter mixture.
Now this is a pretty dry cookie dough.
That’s fine. It’s supposed to be like
that and thanks to this we’re not going
to have to chill our dough, but once
you’ve mixed everything together and
your dough starts to get a little
crumbly, and most of the flour’s been
absorbed, I usually switch over just
using a spatula and just stirring the
dough together that way. Making sure all
of the flour gets completely absorbed
and just stirring until the dough is
really starting to be cohesive and
clinging together.
The reason I don’t like to go too far with my electric
mixer is because you run the risk of
warming up your butter too much and
ending up with a sticky cookie dough
that you would actually have to chill in order to get it to work when we go to cut out our cookies.
Once you have your dough nicely combined, we’re gonna go
ahead and roll it out onto a clean
lightly floured surface. So I’m just
gonna dust my surface with a little bit of
flour, and because this recipe makes so
much dough, I usually only like to work
with about half of it at a time. So it’s
still a little crumbly. That’s fine we’ll
work it together in a second.
Didn’t mean to send it flying everywhere.
I’m just gonna use my hands to kind of work it together.
And once you have a pretty smooth ball,
or a disc, like I have right here,
you’re gonna want to roll this out so
that it’s a quarter of an inch thick.
Once you have your dough rolled out,
you’re going to want to grab your animal
cookie cutters. Now I got these off of
Amazon. You can really use any cookie
cutter. You’ll just have to adjust the
baking time if you use larger or smaller
ones, but I’ll leave a link for these
exact ones in the description below. So
you’re just going to cut out your
cookies.
And drop them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Now these cookies should not spread very
much at all. So you only want to give
them about an inch of space between
cookies. That way you can cook as many as
possible at one time. This recipe makes a
lot of cookies so you’re gonna want to
take advantage of the space on your cookie sheet.
Now if you find that your cookie dough is sticking to your cookie cutters, you’re having trouble getting it
out, you can always just dust these with
a little bit of flour.
Generally I like them to stick a little bit because it
makes it easier for me to transfer them
over to the baking sheet, but if they’re
sticking too much, you’re not able to get
them out, definitely flour your cookie
cutters. Once you’ve loaded up your
cookie sheet, you’re gonna want to
transfer this to your 350 degree
fahrenheit oven where the cookies will
need to bake for about eight to 10
minutes or until they are just beginning
to turn a light golden brown.
So while the cookies are cooling we can go ahead
and make our animal cookie frosting. Now
this is a really simple frosting to make. You’re going to need two cups of powdered sugar to start.
And we’re going to add a tablespoon of meringue powder.
Basically what we’re making here is of
royal icing. It’s going to firm up really
nicely and really hard on our cookies.
Now some royal icing can be made with
egg whites, but since I’m pregnant
I really prefer using the meringue
powder, and I’ve also found this way to
be even easier than using egg whites.
So we’re just going to whisk together our sugar and
our meringue powder
And we’ll also add three tablespoons of water
And 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract
We’re going to switch over to our
electric mixer in just a minute, but
because I don’t want to send powdered
sugar flying everywhere I’m going to
start by just working these ingredients
together with my whisk until the
powdered sugar is nice and wet, and it’s
not gonna go flying when I use my mixer.
Now at this point, you are going to want
to grab your electric mixer and you’re
just going to want to beat this until it
comes to soft peaks. I’ll show you what
that looks like in just a second. This
could take a few minutes.
So here you can see that we have soft
peaks. When I lift the beaters out of the
icing, what happens is that peaks that
form just fold over themselves pretty
much right away. They hold their shape a
little bit. They’re not completely
falling back into a puddle, but they’re
not stiff peaks. They’re not holding
their shape. So this is as far as we want
to go. We don’t want this icing to get
too thick, otherwise it’s going to be
hard to dip our cookies. Now at this
point, I like to add some food coloring.
This is totally optional.
My personal preference for these animal
cookies is gel food coloring. I like to
use Americolor and this is electric pink.
I’m just gonna stir a little bit in.
Once your cookies have cooled, let’s go about
decorating them. Now my favorite way to
do this is just to take the cookie. Hold it firmly by the base and just gently dip it into the surface of my icing.
This icing is going to start getting hard
really fast. So if you want to decorate
your cookies with nonpareils, or
sprinkles, or anything like that, you’re
going to want to do it pretty quickly after dipping them.
Now one thing I love
about using this kind of stiff royal
icing is that it helps preserve the
outline of our cookie cutters. So you can
see every detail of your animal cookies.
And that is how you make these adorable a homemade animal cookies I hope you guys enjoy today’s sweet,
simple, and from scratch recipe, and if you try this one
out please let me know what you think.
Thank you so much for watching and I’ll
see you next time.
It’s almost too cute to eat.
Adorable and delicious.
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