Christmas Cookies!

As is traditional at this time of year, I feel it incumbent upon me to pretend to be a 1950's housewife again and make baked goods. Delicious baked goods, at that. Here are my Christmas Butter cookies, the recipe for which can be found on the BBC Good Food website.

Ingredients:

• 200g Softened Butter
• 140g Caster Sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 300g Plain Flour 

(you could obviously make these more festive by adding in cinnamon, almond extract or whatever else you fancy, I just kept it simple and made them seasonally appropriate with the moulds I used).

Method:

1. Mix the butter and sugar in a large bowl with a wooden spoon (or, if you're me and have a fancy KitchenAid mixer, use that on a low setting).
2. Then add the egg yolk and vanilla extract and briefly beat to combine.
3. Sift over 300g Plain Flour and stir until mixture is well combined- you may need to get your hands in there to bring the dough together.
4. Some recipes for butter cookies suggest wrapping the dough in cling film and letting it cool in the fridge for 20mins..I didn't do that but each to their own. Mostly I was just impatient to eat some Christmas shaped cookies while decorating our tree.
5. Roll out the dough and cut out into your preferred shapes- I used dough cutters in a tree and angel mould but a star shape would be lovely too.
6. Pop onto a non stick baking tray or grease a regular tray, into the oven at 180C/fan 160C/gas mark 4 for 15 mins or until golden brown, remove from the tray and place on a wire rack to cool.
7. Decorate as you wish. I made these for a girly Christmas get together so I decorated each cookie with each lovely lady's name, as you can see below. I used the Dr Oetker icing pen decorating kit, which is really handy. Be warned though- the icing pens will only work if they've been well heated up- I had to put mine in a bowl of just boiled hot water before I could use them, otherwise they won't flow properly and will result in you shaking your fist at the sky and cursing Dr Oetker, whoever he or she may be. 

Mmm. Cookies.