Alice In Wonderland Sugar Cookies

I spent the last weekend at a hen party, so am feeling a little bit fragile today. My friends and I tend to go all out for these kind of things and this weekend was no exception. The theme of the hen party was Alice in Wonderland, one of the bride's favourite books. I, being a crazy cat lady, of course dressed up as the Cheshire Cat.

In my opinion, it's much more fun to be creative with a costume instead of buying one that is made already (and there is a lot out there you can buy for an Alice in Wonderland theme). I went online and bought two pairs of pink and purple striped knee socks and a pair of pink clip-on ears. I wore one pair of socks and used the other pair to make a tail and arm cuffs. The tail I made just by trimming off the end of the sock, sewing it closed with pink wool and stuffing with odd bits of material I had. I cut the other sock in half to create the arm cuffs. I wore a purple dress and shoes I already had and made a cheshire cat smile out of white card and a lollipop stick. I think it cost me about €8 in total to make this costume. I had some face paint on but I drew the line at having a white cheshire cat smile painted on my face all night. So much easier to have a smile I could hold in front of my face when I wanted to.

It was a brilliantly organised weekend and everybody made such an effort for the bride, who loved it. The bridesmaids had asked us to bring along some themed food for the party if we could so I made and decorated sugar cookies.

Sugar Cookies

Recipe:

100g butter
100g caster sugar
1 egg
175g flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer until the mixture is pale, cream and fluffy.

Add the egg and vanilla extract, a small bit at a time

Add the flour gradually until the mixture comes together as a dough (I found the mixture was very "crumby" so I needed to add some more flour and mix it by hand to get it to come together)

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm.

Then, using cookie cutters cut out shapes from the dough and carefully place on a baking tray covered in baking paper.

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I used cat, bauble and circular cookie cutter shapes.

Bake the cookies for 8 - 10 minutes until lightly golden and allow them to cool on a wire rack before decorating.

I used writing icing pens to decorate the cookies and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It was the first time I had used them and the ideas I had in my head for the cookies, didn't really transfer as well as I'd hoped in reality but they were not bad. I got better towards the end of the cookie decorating so as with everything, I think practice is needed.

I decorated the cat shapes with pink and purple icing to make Cheshire cats, the baubles became little "eat me" cookies and the circles became the white rabbits clocks. I really enjoyed the decorating part so it is definitely something I'd like to do more of in future.

We had a lovely evening tea party that included chocolate biscuit cake decorated with "eat me" icing, sponge hearts with cream and strawberries, top hats (marshmallows stuck in chocolate) and little custard strawberry tarts.

As for the rest of the evening, I can confirm that we drank out of the tea cups but they definitely didn't contain tea so the rest of the night was a little less civilised!

N
xx