I have used many cookie dough recipes over the years but this one has got to be by far my fave, it was given to me last Christmas on a little pack of recipe cards someone had handmade but it wasn’t until we moved that I found it again and gave it a whirl, I love that it only has 4 ingredients and I can make most of the recipe in my scrape mixer without a hassle, making it quick and easy! But the best thing about this recipe is that you’ll get around 50 cookies (depending on size) for just under $4, that’s around 8 cents per cookie! Cheap and tasty!

Vanilla Shortbread Cookies

You will need:

250g of butter

1/2 cup of castor sugar

2 cups of plain flour

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Method:

Using an electric mixer cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy then add the vanilla extrect.

Sift the flour and add it to the butter/sugar mixture.

Once combine lightly kneed the dough on a floured bench.

Bake in a preheated oven at 160 degrees for 10-15 minutes or until lightly brown.

And there you have it a nice easy batch of cookie dough, if you are going to be using cutters on this cookie dough its best that before using the dough you pop it in the fridge for a little as the dough can become quite soft when warm (from the kneeing) you can also portion out the dough and roll it into a log, wrap it in baking paper then in cling wrap and freeze for use another day.

Now the fun bit!

Making coloured cookie dough logs to make cute multi coloured cookies! What am I on about? Check out these little guys!

1. Lion and Lamb cookies 2. Rainbow cookies 3. Rainbow Pinwheel Cookies 4. Watermelon Cookies

How cute are they! Now I wanted to do something a little different and we’re limited on what colours we can use as I do try and avoid artificial colours with the kids so I thought some little flowers would be super cute!

And making these cute little cookies is quite easy, here’s how;

Take a batch of cookie dough (see above for recipe) and divided into 2 sections, the smaller ball is approx 1/3 of the mix and the larger ball 2/3′s

For the flower cookies above the smaller ball will be our flower centre and as such doesn’t need to be coloured and the larger ball will be our petals, to colour the larger ball place it into a mixing bowl and add a few drops of food colouring and give it a mix, I’ve used Queen Natural Pink liquid colour but gel colouring would work best as the more you add the sticker to dough becomes, but you can always kneed in a little flour to compensate.

Next make a ‘sausage’ with the pale dough (you want this to be thick but not too thick), then roll out the pink dough so that it is of even thickness and is wide/long enough to wrap around the pale dough, place the pale dough into the centre of the pink dough and wrap it around and smooth over the seems.

As you can see I ended up with quite a large cookie dough log so I cut it into sections, wrapped it in cling wrap and placed it in the fridge for an hour to make it easier to work with when cutting it.

Next cut the log into 1-1 1/2 cm slices

Next I used the flower mini cutter from our basic shapes set to cut the flowers, making sure the cutter is well centred.

A little tip with the mini cutters is that its easier to get anything you’ve cut out by going through the cutter rather than pushing it back out of the bottom of the cutter.

Pop em on a baking tray lined with baking paper and then into a pre heated oven for 10-12 minutes and you’ll have yourself cute little cookie that need no icing and your little ones will love!