A windfall of sugar cookies.

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

Rarely do I use cookie cutters and even more rare do I use ones I see in stores and dream beautiful baked dreams, but never use. This time I put to use small pie pastry cutters and some forest animal cookie cutters I picked up from IKEA (which were meant for cottage fun, but never made it there).

The cookie recipe worked out great. The dough was extremely easy to work with. I ended up freezing half of it and used it a couple of weeks later for thumb print cookies which were quite tasty.

I always like the looks of an iced sugar cookie and was quite inspired by the posts of others. What I forgot was that I hated doing it, but was quickly reminded at 11pm as I stood at my kitchen counter with my head proped up by one hand, icing bag in the other, diligently piping . Maybe it's because it was so late and I was tired, maybe because I forgot what a process it all was. Either way, although my family loved them and my mother shared them proudly with friends over a cuppa, they made me hate life briefly.  They were quite cute...