Sweet, delicious cookies: cooked by me. Om nom nom.
Additional pictures and explanation after the cut. If you need an explanation for cookies, that is.
Back in September, I picked up a dragon-shaped cookie cutter via an online retailer. I have now put it to use, and my results are below. (I know my pastry-fu is weak, but this is the journey not the destination. Next year’s efforts will show improvement.)
The cutter works, in that it produces recognizably dragon-shaped cookies. This is a marked improvement over the other dragon cookie cutter I own, which makes cookies that look like deformed seals.
Given the intricate design and my lack of cookie-making experience, I was only able to cut cookies one at a time: roll, cut, peel away excess dough from the outside, scrape, repeat. The excessive handling meant I had to keep a careful eye on the proportion of flour in the dough and the temperature of everything. It also probably made the cookies tougher than they really needed to be. But it did work out with some patience.
The recipe I used was nothing special, just the one from the the Pillsbury Complete Book of Baking — my go-to source for everyday baking. Sorry, Larousse. If you have a favorite sugar cookie recipe, just use that. I would strongly suggest that you bake on (ungreased) parchment paper instead of directly on the cookie sheet, since it makes moving these guys around intact a whole lot easier.
I didn’t do much in the way of decoration. I sculpted one cookie with a paring knife, and I’m actually pretty happy with how it turned out, but it was fairly time-consuming. A few of the others got little eyeballs added by hand. Otherwise, I left them undecorated. (I’m not generally a fan of frosted cookies.) Some colored sugar or even an airbrushing with vegetable dye might have improved matters, though. Next time. I probably have to address some doubts about the food-safety of my compressed air supply before I do the airbrush thing, though.
Eating them seems so very wrong. The game — and it is far from being a nice one — is that before you eat a cookie, you invent a reason why that dragon’s getting eaten. He has an spotted hide; it’d be a mercy. This one looks a little green. That one is an eater of eggs.
Bon appétit, I guess.
[Edited 2010-02-10 by dhenke to remove Amazon links. See explanatory post.]