Culinary Concoctions by Peabody

The Food

Once again it is time to throw on my party dress and head out to the blog party. This month’s theme is Kid’s Party and luckily for me one of the ideas I had in my head before this ever came about fit into this category perfectly.

Growing up my mother always made homemade cookies. There were only two types of cookies that she would usually buy from the store. Those were Oreo’s and Circus Animals. Oh how I loved those little pink and white sprinkled blobs that were suppose to be animals. I spend half my time eating them and the other half trying to figure out what animal I was eating. And since when is a hippo a circus animal? So in my quest to find circus animal cut outs that were small, all of them came with an Ark, and well I didn’t want that. So I stumbled across some mini farm animal cookie cutters and quickly snatched them up knowing that I had wanted to give it a go. I have actually been working on this idea for the last couple of weeks, and boy it has stumped me…mostly the frosting that is. Circus animal frosting has caranuba wax and that is what makes the frosting so unique. Well getting my hands on some was going to require me to buy a lot of it in bulk. And though I am dedicated to my blog….I just don’t need that much caranuba wax. So I pretty much gave up on the idea of replicating the taste of the cookie and went for trying to match the asthetics of the cookies.

 

Small cookies lead to big problems. Tiny little cookie cutters leave room for lots of things like beaks to be ripped off when not being careful in tranfering them out of the cutter. I lost many a tail, leg and head today(moment of silence please). Small cookies also lead to standing in the kitchen for hours cutting them out.

I originally had more of an actual animal cracker in mind for my “circus” animals but changed to a sugar cookie when I figured I could not match the flavor of the icing. Both my husband and dog love a good sugar cookie, so I knew I would have no problems unloading them.

 

Sugar Cookie Dough:                                                                   

4 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1 lb, 8 oz  unsalted butter, softened

3 eggs

1 TBSP vanilla extract

7 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 TBSP baking soda

1 TBSP cream of tartar

Preheat oven to 375F.

1. Cream the powdered sugar and butter for at least 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and scrape down the bowl after each egg. Add vanilla and mix for 2 more minutes.

2. Mix in the flour, baking soda and cream of tartar while mixer is on slow speed. Mix till you have a smooth dough. Chill for at least 4 hours before rolling out.

3. Roll out dough and cut using whatever shapes you would like(doesn’t really matter once you throw icing on them, it’s anyone’s guess as to what they are)

*This recipe has been passed around my family for awhile and it has never said how many cookies it will make. I got 4 very large balls of dough out of this batch. And about 180 farm animals.

Icing for “Circus Cookies”

2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk

1 TBSP vanilla

pink food coloring

Whisk the sugar, milk and vanilla together until smooth. Set 1/2 of the icing to the side to remain white. Add pink food coloring to the second half of icing.

To make the ‘Circus” Animals:

Dip on side of cookie into icing. Before icing sets up sprinkle on multi-colored decoration balls. Let sit for about an hour to set up. Once done, enjoy trying to figure out what it is you are eating….that is a cow by the way in the photo below.

 

 

 

 

The Beverage:

 

I never have a problem coming up with the food for Blog Party but the drink recipe always throws me for a loop. I never usually drink mixed drinks( a wine girl myself) and even worse was trying to think of a non-alcoholic drink for the “kiddies” to enjoy. I usually have milk with my sugar cookies, the one exception being Christmas in which I have my sugar cookies with hot chocolate on Christmas morning. So hot chocolate it was, but I didn’t want it to be hot, so I made it frozen, kind of like a shake.

 

Hot Chocolate(that caught a cold)

6 TBSP unsweetened cocoa powder

6 TBSP sugar

2 1/2 cups milk

2 1/2 cups light cream

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Ice

Marshmallows(if the mood strikes you)

Preperation:

Add sugar and cocoa to milk and heat in a sauce pan unitl dissolved. Add the cream and vanilla. Heat until almost boiling. Mix well and let cool. When completely cooled, place “hot” chocolate and some ice cubes in a blender and put on liquify. Pour into a glass or mug of your choice. Sprinkle on some marshmallows….after all this is suppose to be for kids.

 

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