“I had an idea,” said Baby A. “We could make cookies for Earth Day with that royal icing.” Well, given that it was 3 p.m. the day before Earth Day and she had three injured fingers from falling off the monkey bars, I had a different (and by “different,” I mean “easier”) idea. Easy wins in my house ev.er.y time. So here’s how to make easy Earth Day cookies. (Sorry it’s last minute. Last week with travel was not easy. Fun and worth it, but not easy.)
Make homemade sugar cookies if you want. But I had cookie mix packets on hand, so that’s how we played this game. I used Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix. All you have to do is follow the instructions for cut-out cookies. Even though you are not cutting anything out, the cookies will hold their shape better. So that’s 1/3 cup of butter, one egg, one tablespoon of flour and the mix.
I was baking for two classrooms so I made one batch of mix at a time. Add green gel food coloring to one batch and blue to the next batch. (Be sure to wipe down your mixer between batches.)
Remove your dough from the mixer and kneed it with your palms to finish incorporating the dye. For each color, pick off about a bit of dough about the size of a grape and roll it into a ball.
Roll the grape-size balls into rope shapes.
Criss cross your ropes.
Loosely shape your ropes into a ball.
Roll your loose ball into a firm ball. Don’t overwork your dough because you want the colors to stay separate.
This idea comes from Jamilyn of I Heart Nap Time (best blog name ever, BTW): use a styrofoam bowl (or any flat-bottomed bowl) to squish your balls down into even circles. If you use the same amount of pressure to achieve the same level of flatness for each cookie, your cookies will bake evenly.
Line your cookie sheet with parchment paper. (Don’t skip this step: cookies will lift cleanly off the cookie tray and clean up will be a breeze.) Space the cookies evenly.
Follow the baking instructions on the bag. Each of my batches took 7 minutes to bake. So, you’ll need to work quickly to roll and squish each of your earth circles for the next batch. Ta-da! You have super easy Earth Day cookies!
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