(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.)

This month’s Daring Bakers Challenge looked difficult.  I’m not an artistic type. I make tons of sugar cookies at Christmas, but that’s about it, so I don’t have many non-Christmas cookie cutters – and I didn’t think “Christmas in September” would fly.

But September happened to be the month I did a massive spring cleaning of my pantry.  I have a huge panty – probably bigger then some NYC kitchens – and it accumulates stuff.  I took everything out, cleaned it all, and gave away a bunch of stuff I never use. 

And I found my tea cake mold. I bought it a few years ago, with the intention of using it for very detailed chocolates.  It failed miserably – because it was metal, you couldn’t get the chocolates back out of the mold.  It’s sat in my pantry ever since.

But when I came across it, I thought, “I bet I could bake tiny sugar cookies in that!  And then put a tiny bit of icing on top, and it would run down the sides, and I’d have these cute little cookies that would look like Bundt cakes with glaze on top! And that would be perfect for this month’s challenge!”.

So I made the sugar cookie dough, and I pressed  it into the molds, and I baked them.

I should have used a little less dough in each one – they puffed up over the top and had to be trimmed.  But they came out rather good, and I particularly liked the heart-shaped ones.  They were an interesting texture, too, with lots of crunchy edges, but soft in the middle.

Then I made the royal icing.  I used the recipe from Joy of Baking, with egg whites.  I have really good professional gel food coloring, so I split it into thirds and did one bowl each of orange, brown, and black.  The black didn’t turn out – the color had separated, and I got a dreadful shade of green.  But the orange and brown came out bright and September-y.

But when I tried to put it on the cookies, it refused to drizzle nicely down the sides.  Plus, with a dab of icing on top, I lost the details that made the cookies look good in the first place.  So I ended up with some rather uninteresting, but brightly-colored, lumps of sugar cookie.

I tried to thin out the icing, but it still wouldn’t drip down the sides like a glaze. If I ever try this again, I’d probably actually use a glaze recipe and skip the royal icing.

Still, the cookies were good, and now I have a use for my pan.  Hopefully, I’ll have better luck with next month’s challenge!

I have too many cookbooks. My cookbook rack overflowed, then my cookbook shelf, then my 2 cookbook shelves.  Too many of them sit and gather dust, but there are a few I use all the time. 

This recipe is from one of the ones I use all the time – Martha Stewart’s Cookies. Every cookie I’ve made out of it has turned out well, and I’ve made quite a few of them.

The first time I tried them, I wasn’t sure about the lemon juice.  I’m still not sure how "old-fashioned" it is to put lemon in sugar cookies.  But it is awfully good.

Sugar cookies tent to be boring – the lemon brightens them up enough to make these interesting.  The texture is good – crisp on the outside, chewy in the middle.  I make them like all my other cookie recipes – mix up the whole batch, then use a scoop to make individual balls, which I keep in the fridge or freeze.  These actually benefit from a few hours in the  fridge – it keeps them from spreading out as much, making the middle thicker and chewier. 

They’d probably also work well with orange or lime instead of the lemon.  But the lemon is so good that I don’t have much of an incentive to modify them.

( see the recipe )

My boyfriend loves snickerdoodles.  I don’t dislike them, but when I want cookies, they never seem to come to mind.  I’m much more likely to make peanut butter cookies, or chocolate chip cookies, or oatmeal-raisin cookies.

But I saw a recipe on The Kitchn the other day, and it looked interesting, mostly because of the technique.  Almost all cookie recipes are the same:  Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and vanilla, add the flour, add in chips/raisins.

This one is different – you melt the butter, then mix together all the dry ingredients.  Whisk the eggs and vanilla into the butter (let it cool first!).  Then combine the wet and dry ingredients, make into balls, roll in cinnamon and sugar, bake, and you’re done.

I upped the spices quite a bit from the original.  If you like your cookies less cinnamon-y, you can use less – but if you don’t want cinnamon, why are you making snickerdoodles?

They come out amazingly soft and chewy – I’m not sure how much of that was the melted butter and how much was the technique, but whatever it was really worked.  You end up with a very thin sugar crust on the outside, with a soft, chewy center inside.

I was planning to also be able to comment on how good they were the next day – but they didn’t last that long!

( see the recipe )

I read the article in the New York Times when these first came out.  “36 hours to make chocolate chip cookies?   And you have to weigh all the ingredients?  And two different types of flour?  How much better then tollhouse could they be?”

So I bookmarked the recipe – but I put off actually making them.

I don’t even remember the first time I tried them, but I think it was for a party.  I carefully weighed out the flour (and the sugar, since I already had the scale out), I let the flour and sugar cream in the mixer for the full five minutes, and I let them sit in the fridge overnight before I actually made them.  I didn’t try to hunt down chocolate chunks – I just used the Ghiradelli 60% cacao chips.

They were amazing.  Everyone raved over them.  They had the perfect texture – crunchy on the outside, chewy in the middle.  They were buttery.  The salt really did add something to both the taste and the texture.

They instantly become my go-to cookie.

There were only two problems:  I thought the bittersweet chips, especially after the addition of the salt, overpowered the rest of the cookie a bit, and it was a real pain to scoop out the cold, hard dough from the bowl when it was time to actually bake them.

Over time, I’ve streamlined the process a bit.  Now I use the Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips.  And instead of just putting the entire bowl of dough into the fridge, I use a cookie scoop to scoop out individual balls, and just pile them in a bowl, then put that bowl in the fridge over night.  Then when the time comes to bake them, I just break off as many as I want and pop them in the oven.  I’ve even had good luck freezing the dough, if I need to make them really far in advance.

Best of all, you can apply the same basic techniques here to other cookies – almost any cookie recipe is improved if you are very, very thorough about creaming the butter and the sugar, and then let it rest in the fridge over night.

( see the recipe )