Yesterday we started making cookies, rather late I realized, last year we started a whole month earlier. Must be the weather, it was way to warm to get into christmas mood.
As always we started with a kids cookie, hoping that while they are busy decorating we have time to try some new things. It worked, at least for me. My friend was very busy keeping the kid from eating all the dough, liking all the icing and pinching all the sugar decoration.
Our kids cookies are very simple, make a sablé dough and then mix many icing colors which the kid love, we always end up with way to many different color pots. Pink is a must for my boy, my friend needs at least green and yellow, her boy usually wants violet and I make a proper red. But then we still don't have a nice ice blue ....
And then I get out the big red box filled with every possible cake decoration accumulated during the last 5 years and the boys are quiet for a second, the first and last time today. My advise: if you want eat some of these cookies too, set some aside because the rest will be loaded with decoration.

Pastry:

250 g Flour
175 g Butter,
75 g Sugar
1 pinch Salt
a little bit of Vanilla pith

Beat the butter mix in all the other ingredients. Make the dough. Put into cling film and refrigerate for 1 hour. Roll out on a floured work  surface to a thickness of 7mm. Cut out your shapes and bake for approx. 8 minutes.

Icing:

Mix a little bit of fresh lemon juice with icing sugar. Color with food color.

The cookie is pictured lying on one of my favorite art books: Shades of time by the swiss photographer Annelies Strba by Lars Müller Publishing.

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