Happy Easter

I have to share a fun treat my sister's family makes. I love to color eggs. I think it's all about playing with the colors. It doesn't matter to me how old or young the kids around are, lets go play with those colors!

I think I share that same fun feeling for these Easter cookies. I don't have the real recipe for this treat, we'll have to hope my sister Christine reads this and gives up the recipe but I do have the verison I made with my kids. So here it goes:

Make sugar cookies (my simple recipe is to follow)

Cut three egg holes in half the cookies before baking.

I use a lid off a pill bottle and cut with a tiny knife but you may go free hand and do an egg shape! Bake, there will be a top with holes and a bottom without.

Make a batch of buttercream icing (recipe to follow) put it into three cereal bowls and dye each a lovely Spring pastel. I like green, yellow and pink. Go easy on the drops of food dye you can always add more and pastel is very light.

I always made three icing cones (I found cone paper at Michaels but you may have a plastic one) and filled each one with a different color. I matched up the cookie tops and bottoms. Took a toothpick and through the hole put a prick in the center to mark the spot. I removed the top cookie with holes and piped a big glob of color one at each toothpick point. Make sure you put enough icing to spread inside and poke out that egg hole.

Put the tops back on being careful to match the the holes with the center of each piped icing color. This goes faster than it sounds and when you push that cookie down on the icing

....MAGIC Three eggs appear!

Enjoy this lovely tradition.

Grade School Easy Sugar cookies

1 cup of butter at room temp. 1 cup sugar Cream until mixed add: 1 egg 1 teas. Vanilla Stir in by hand just until flour is mixed in. 3 cups flour ½ teas. baking powder ½ teas. Salt form into two flat squares, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least an hour. Instead of using flour to roll your cookies use a dusting of sugar to keep dough from sticking on the counter. Or mix flour and sugar. I find a rolling cloth works even better. A finely woven cotton towel (the kind that doesn’t make lint) dust the sugar on the cloth and roll. Nothing sticks that way. The sugar looks pretty on the top of the cookies anyway. Bake for 8 to 10 min at 400 degrees until lightly brown on the edges.

Buttercream

1 pound of confectioners sugar, sift out lumps

1/2 cup of shortening (I just use butter)

2 tablespoons butter

Beat this in a mixer until light and fluffy

Add approx. 1/3 cup of milk a couple of tablespoons at a time. Keep the frosting fairly firm

flavor with 1 1/2 teas of vanilla extract, or lemon, or orange You can keep the frosting a bit stiff and hand stir in a different flavor for each color. Takes the simple out of the process

Keep beating until the frosting seems fluffy enough to push though the cone and firm enough to pop out the cookie hole as an egg.

This is not hard to do. Just add that milk slowly.

If you only have one pastry bag to put the icing in: line up all the cookies (there goes the dining room table!) with their matches below them. Pipe all of one color, wipe it out with a paper towel and pipe another color, do the same and pipe the last color before closing the cookies. If you use water to wash the bag it will be hard to get it dry enough to do the next color. So what if a tiny bit of color remains from the color before!