Cookies

kitchen director for Everyday with Rachael Ray Magazine. Today, I'm decorating some cookies and I wanna show you a few techniques that I really like. I'm working on some Christmas trees here. The dough is raw and chilled and they're almost ready to go into the oven. I have one more to finish. I have beaten egg white here. I'm gonna lightly brush the egg white onto the cookie . Egg white is great. It helps the sprinkles adhere and leaves a nice shiny finish on the baked cookie . Just give it a nice generous sprinkling of green sugar sprinkles and it's so easy and it's really great. The next technique I have is dipping in chocolate. I have some hearts that I've already been working on. This is melted semi-sweet chocolate and the chocolate is still warm. Simply pick up the cookie in tilt the bowl and swipe the cookie in the bowl to try to get as much chocolate as you can up the surface of the heart. Then I'm gonna scrape off any excess and lay the cookie down on parchment paper. And then the last technique I wanna show you involves royal icing, which is really fun to work with because you can make it any color you want. Now I've already started outlining these cookies . I have a plastic disposable pastry bag. You can use washable plastic bags or the waxy coated canvas bags. These I really like 'cause you can just throw them away when you're done. And you're gonna use your dominant hand to stir and then your other hand to help you stay nice and calm as you go around. I'm slightly above the surface of the cookie and I let the icing drop down onto the cookie , and I'm close to the edge but about 1/8 inch from the edge. So, these have dried. I'm gonna show you how

Rachael Ray Magazine. Today, I'm gonna show you how to make pinwheel cookies because they can be a little tricky. I'm gonna use our recipe for black and tan pinwheels. I'm gonna start by scattering

butter which means, you don't have to eat the whole batch of cookies yourself, you have to share them. Measure this. Right, this is a little bit wide, so I think I should even this

in the freezer for 30 minutes, so I'm ready to cut the cookies . Put them on the baking sheet. I'm gonna use my bench scrapper and cut cookies that are about a third of an inch thick. I'm gonna just trim the end right here 'cause I don't need that. You could also use a knife but bench scrapper works great. After I cut a bunch, I'm gonna transfer them to the baking sheet with my offset spatula. Generally speaking, I put cookies 2-inches apart on a baking sheet. Now, you can see that the dough is pretty soft, but we're gonna adjust the shape. So, don't worry if your cookies are a little bit flat. So, you could see the dough is really forgiving because you can just reshape it as you

bit of pumpkin and cream blended together. Next, we're gonna get the cookies ready. This is a 10-ounce package of gingersnaps, somewhere between 3 and 4 cups. So, I'm gonna transfer the cookie crumbs back to the bowl and then I'm gonna add the rum. You could add 3 tablespoons of rum. A French lady

that you have. Next, I'm gonna add about a third of the cookies and evenly sprinkle them around. Then for the last step, we're gonna add the remaining two cups of whip cream that we have in the fridge and decorate the top of the trifle with the remaining cookie crust. And then it's all done. You don't have to worry about using the same spatula that you've been using because you're gonna cover up any little booboos with your cookie crumbs. And it's a great instant dessert. Now, I said you can let this trifle sit in the refrigerator for 4 hours

back here. And then, I'm going to set out a plate for cookies . And so, I've got both store-bought cookies and I've got some homemade ones. But when you've got different sorts of desserts or different sorts of foods that are kind of coming together like, let's say, you got a potluck and like eight people brought different kinds of cookies , rather than setting them up in different dishes, put them all together in one place. That way, people can kind of try

So I've got my bread pudding that lives here. I've got assorted cookies which contain nuts. This is a great idea if you have people coming that are going to have any food allergies or