No icing candy cane cookies

My kids like making cookies. Actually they love making cookies. I should imagine in that respect they are far from unusual children. I think I've blogged about us making several experimental cookies before. The ones I can remember are:

The leprecaun gold at the end of the rainbow cookies

The Giant cookie and cookie pizza efforts

The lacing cookies that were done quite recently

For all of these we've just used regular plain old sugar cookie dough. The kids love how it tastes, and it's an easy type of dough for them to work with rolling and cutting, plus it's pretty pale in colour, so you can play with food colouring with it easily.

This time I wanted to try and make Christmas cookies that didn't require icing. I like to be able to dip my cookies (although I call them biscuits) in my tea, and icing is no good for that, plus it's a hassle to whip egg whites and all that guff to make royal icing. The answer I decided was to make a batch of sugar cookie dough that was half red and half plain, so we could make candy canes.

Roll out a bit of red and a bit of white into long snakes.

Then twist them up and roll them a bit more.

plonk on a baking sheet and curve over the top into a candy cane shape and squish it down a little to make it flatter.

Bake happily and see if you can manage to get a picture of your children with them before they inhale them.

Oh look, the second batch out of the oven I was actually able to get near to to take a pic before they were nommed!
Also, make sure your kids are well fed before you embark on this, because my three year old was peckish enough that she just wanted to eat the dough raw and flip out like a ninja when her dough snakes broke. So she ended up keeping her self composed by cutting shapes with cookie cutters. The burly man of the house made the wee pretty little flower :)

We only did half the batch of dough with the kids, so there was more for me to play with after they had gone to bed. I decided to make dinky little ones that could be hooked on the edge of a cup of tea.

I'd seen this post about making cute mini gingerbread houses at "Not Martha" and knew that I didn't have the dedication to cut out all those pieces and make icing and stick them together, so a candy cane seemed like the easy option, and just the right shape to hang too. The kids scarfed them before they had a chance to hang on anything. By the way, I have been informed by my children that the collinder full of shredded christmas tree and snipped up mardi gras beads is "reindeer food". So, if you find sparkly poop on your lawn on Christmas day, you know you scored a hit on Santa's good list.

So, if you want to drink your tea in a lady like festive way then give it a go.

Or if you have a blood:tea ratio to maintain like I do then maybe something a little more substantial ;)