You need just a few pretty basic supplies for this. The cookie recipe has pretty simple ingredients. I think the only thing I didn't have on hand was the orange, everything else I already had in the pantry.
For the cookie recipe you'll need:
1 cup of butter, softened
1 cup of sugar
1 egg
2 T orange juice
1 t freshly grated orange zest
1/8 t salt
3 cups of flour
1/2 t baking soda
orange food color (I used in gel form)
yellow food color (I used in gel form)
1/2 sugar to make then sparkle after they are baked.
You'll also need a loaf pan, lined with waxed paper or plastic food wrap
The instructions on how to bake the cookies can be found at the Land O' Lakes website, but it's a very simple, basic cookie recipe. Cream the butter and sugar. Then add the egg, orange juice, orange zest, and salt. Beat until well mixed and then add the flour and baking soda until well combined.
At this point, I knew I would have to divide the dough into thirds. Some people are great at just eyeballing this kind of thing. Not me. I had to get out my kitchen scale and weigh the total weight of the dough, which was about 30 ounces. So I knew I had to make 3, 10 ounce balls.
Then, take one of the balls of dough and just set it in the bottom of the loaf pan, and press it flat against the bottom. Next, dye one of the balls of dough orange, add it to the loaf pan and press until flat, then dye the last ball of dough yellow and do the same. The series of pictures below help illustrate the process.
When you're done your loaf pan should look like this.
Now, you'll want to refrigerate the dough for at least two hours, or overnight.
After two hours or overnight, remove the dough from the pan. I cut off the very edge of the dough, so that I could start with a nice even edge of dough. Then, just slice about a 1/4 inch off of the brick of dough and start cutting it at an angle. Then arrange them on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for about 9 minutes, depending on your oven.
Once you pull them out of the oven, if you're going to add the pretty sugar on top to make them "sparkle" only let them cool for a minute, so that when you put them in the sugar it sticks. If you are going to put the sugar on, just put 1/2 cup of sugar in a bowl, drop the cookie in and mix it around a bit.
When you're done, you have the cutest little candy corn cookies! I've included a picture of both sugared, and no sugar just in case you'd like to compare and see which you prefer!
Imagine how cute these would be in a favor bag with Halloween themed ribbon (as the video on the Land O' Lakes website suggests!).
xoxo,
Katie
