You know how much I like printing with leaves, right?* Well, I've had this idea for making leaf prints on cookies for a while now and finally gave it a try (with Maia printing away beside me and Daphne trying to eat all the cookie dough).
We started with a batch of cookie dough for pecan sandies from my much-loved Baking Illustrated cookbook. The recipe calls for rolling the dough into logs, chilling it, then slicing it into cookies. I think any refridgerator cookie or even sugar cookie would probably work fine for this, but boy, the pecan sandies are delicious!
We spread the cookies out on a parchment-lined baking sheet, gathered some small leaves from around the yard, and created our food coloring stamp pads.
The stamp pads were easy to make. I simply cut out pieces of felt (actually scraps from a felted wool sweater, but just because I couldn't find my stash of regular felt), set them in small dishes, then added our "edible ink." For that we just mixed about half and half food coloring and water in a small dish then let the felt soak it up.
To make the leaf prints we pressed a leaf onto our stamp pad (vein side down works best despite my photos)...
Then onto the cookie.
Here's our baking sheet of pecan sandies printed and ready for the oven.
They mostly turned out. The leaf prints weren't quite as crisp as I was hoping, but hey, we were printing on cookies!
And they certainly tasted good! Pecan sandies are amazingly easy and amazingly delicious with more of a caramel flavor than pecan. Yum!
*Some of our past leaf printing projects include:
