Beautiful Bug Cookies:
Toll House chocolate chip bug-shaped cookies ("cakey" recipe) dipped in yellow, pink, red & blue chocolate with green and dark chocolate details, decorated with sanding sugar.
With the success of the French Poodle bone cookies (see November posts), two other former students who share the same birthday wanted pink butterflies for their school birthday treat. Luckily, I already owned the Bugs mini loaf baking pan from Williams-Sonoma which had butterflies, bees, ladybugs and dragonflies. This project was going to give me even more experience working with my chocolate melting pot and see if I couldn't perfect the art of chocolate covered chocolate chip cookies.
This time, I was planning on dunking the cookies into the melting pot, in the hopes of getting a more even coating, rather than pouring the chocolate over the cookie like last time. Finally, success! This is a much better way of coating something as big as these cookies, so I was happy. The difference between these cookie "bars" and the dog bones was that I thought, why not jazz them up with some sanding sugars? So I went to my decorating vault and found complimentary decorating sugars for each cookie. Again, as this is all fairly new to me, I did learn another valuable lesson: fine grain sanding sugars will just about disappear into melted chocolate and the coarser grain work much better.
Another extremely important lesson: if you don't want red sugar to turn your hands permanently hot pink, use a spoon! Wearing gloves is not an option because it won't prevent your body heat from warming up the sugar anyway. So now I know!
Just in case anyone was wondering, the ratio of Toll House cookie dough per batch was about 3/4 of a batch to each pan of 8 cookie bars. These bug cookies were on the larger side-almost 50% bigger than the bone cookies. And I did find a "cakey" Toll House Recipe on the Nestle website. If you use the recipe straight off the bag, I found the centers went hollow.
Next up: I take on Martha Stewart!
0 comments:
Post a Comment