My Favorite Iced Cookies

Listen up Belle...

...don't even think about touching my bacon!

Today was another prep day. Tomorrow my younger daughter and I are spending the day at the fair. We are both participating in the President's Favorite Apple Contest, sponsored by Domino Sugar. Every year the State Fair President picks a food theme for his contest - sorta like the "secret ingredient" except it's not a secret - and this year's theme is apples. Rules are that you have to have to have some kind of apple product in your item as well as some Domino Sugar.

The second contest of the day is the Kid's Cookie Contest (the official name is something much longer). In this contest, you bring 6 cookies made with Domino Sugar. Three random kids get picked from the audience and they judge the cookies and pick the winners. Anything goes. The kids might be 4 years old or they might be 12. Girls or boys. They might hate nuts or love peanut butter. I won one year and made the exact same recipe a couple years later and didn't even place. It's totally up to the whim of the kids. Usually though, the super elaborately decorated pretty cookies don't do well because the kids, surprisingly, don't care for a ton of icing. With that in mind, I decided to make my childhood favorite iced cookies.

Growing up in Indianapolis, I loved going to Roselyn Bakery. One of my favorite cookies was their "Happy Face Cookie." It was essentially a huge thick oval cookie that was covered in yellow icing and had a smiley face piped on it with chocolate icing. Simple but oh so good! I was devastated when the bakeries closed. Soon after though, the name was bought out and the former Roselyn Bakery recipes were published in a cook book. I asked for and received the cook book for Christmas the year it was published.

This is the Happy Face Cookie recipe from their cook book. Rather than make happy faces, I cut my dough into T-shirt shaped and iced them like tie-dye t-shirts.

Cookie ingredients

2 cups butter

1 ¼ cup sugar

1 ½ teaspoon salt

1 ¾ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 egg

4 ¼ cups bread flour

Cream together butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla. Add in egg. Mix in flour until dough is stiff and waxy. Refrigerate dough until firm.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll dough out and cut into T-shirt shapes. Bake for 15 minutes until bottoms are golden brown. Remove from baking sheet and cool completely.

Icing ingredients  (I halved the recipe because the original made 13 cups of icing!)

3/8 cup water

½ cup sugar

4 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

3/8 cup light corn syrup

¾ teaspoon vanilla extract

Food coloring as desired

Add water, sugar, and ¼ cup confectioners’ sugar to a saucepan and bring to a rolling boil. Put vegetable oil and corn syrup in another bowl and add cooked mixture to it. Add remaining confectioners’ sugar and mix on low speed until all the lumps are gone. Add vanilla extract and mix well.

Add food coloring as desired and pour on cookies while still warm.

 Icing needs to set up overnight and I'll be good to go!

On the running front, the week was OK. Went like this...
Sunday - 3 miles
Monday - "rest" (actually made cakes like a mad woman)
Tuesday - 3 miles
Wednesday - 7 miles
Thursday - 10 miles
Friday - rest (missed my cross-training again!)
Saturday - 7 miles

Total miles 30 miles for the week.

Next week will be tough. My husband is out of town all week, I have kids to drive to extra-curriculars all week, I will be at the fairgrounds on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday, plus I'm working... and it's a 40 mile running week with a long run of 16 miles. I have one more "wiggle week" left but I want to save it for the week I run the Mill Race half-marathon. If things fall apart this coming week though, I may need to use it early!

Good night!