Aaron's Beer Cookies

Monday morning I woke up in a sweat because the days had snuck up on me and I realized my friend Aaron's birthday was on Wednesday. I was planning on making him cookies... and I hadn't designed the cookies.... and I needed to then ship the cookies. Oh, and I was out of flour and sugar. So I was scramblin.

Luckily, I know Aaron loves beer. So I went down that road (it's hard to come up with "manly cookies"). It's funny, because after I shipped him the cookies we were talking about what he wanted to do for his birthday and he chose to go to a swanky beer bar in NYC (The Ginger Man. I highly recommend it).

So for these cookies. I hand cut all of the glasses and bottles. To do this you take a very sharp paring knife and go at it. Sometimes if I know they are cookies I might make again, I make a template using some hard plastic. My mom found these old plastic binder dividers down in our basement and they are perfect. You want it to be hard enough that it wont bend when you cut the shape out, but also easy enough to cut when you are making them. Other materials that work great for this are the tops of coffee cans or the flat sides of milk jugs. Once you have your material, just draw your shape on it (or print out a picture and trace it), and cut it out. What is nice about the plastic is you can just wash it with some dish soap and reuse it as many times as you need.

Also, if I need to make a lot of a certain cookie, but it is a really special order that I will probably never make again, I just use a manilla folder, draw my shape on it, and cut it out. Then when I'm done I can just chuck it.

But for these, I just eyeballed it. And it kinda shows, especially in the bottle. It was just a little uneven and wonky. Once again, I was rushing a bit. I do have the cookie cutter for the speech bubbles. You can buy it here. But if you don't want to splurge, you can easily just use an oval or circle and ad a little triangle to the bottom.

Then, when it came to mixing the icing colors, I mixed together my left over royal icing from the Back to School Cookies. I used the yellow, tan and reds to make all of the beer colors. And it worked great. Then I used the leftover black and white.

Finally, don't be like me. I made the same boo-boo twice in a row. When I was going to flood the speech bubble cookies, I picked the outlined ones up and crunched my royal icing (see exhibit A below...). I was upset after the first one, but I made three so I figured I would be fine. Then I picked up the second one and I DID IT AGAIN! Total bummer. The third I didn't screw up (Phew). But then when I was writing on it, I hit a water pocket in my royal icing bag and the whole cookie was ruined. So, don't be like me. Always be really gentle and careful when picking up your cookies and don't fill your icing bags too early, because the water will begin to separate out.

In the end, no matter how many imperfections you see on your cookies, your recipient will love them and eat them all up anyways. So, Happy Birthday, Aaron! I'm sorry you had to read this story.

Ps. I have been informed by Aaron himself that in under 24 hours of receiving the cookies, he ate 8 of the 12 cookies. I am unsure whether or not anyone helped him eat them. But I don't judge. Cookies are a perfectly acceptable meal.

You can find the cookie and royal icing recipes here.