- Cream the soft butter with the sugar until the combination is smooth not grainy to the touch in a mixing bowl.
-Add all 4 eggs at one time...Continue to mix. -Add the vanilla.. Continue mixing.
-Sift the four, baking powder, and salt together.
-Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture.
-Continue mixing to make sure all ingredients are thoroughly blended.
-Make the dough into a ball, wrap it in cling wrap completely covering the entire dough ball.
-Put in the refrigerator for about 6 hours or overnight. Check to see if the dough is firm.
-Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
-Pull the cookie dough out of the refrigerator and sit it out to soften up a bit.
- Put flour out on the wood cutting board, rub flour on the rolling pin, and work some flour into the batter.
-Roll the dough out on the cutting board and using your MINI APPLE cookie cutter begin to make your cookies.
-Line the cookie sheet with parchment paper.
-Using a metal spatula move the cut cookie to the parchment lined cookie sheet.
-Bake at 325 degrees for 8 minutes. Check to see if the cookie are thoroughly baked.
-Take the cookies off of the cookie sheet and put on a wire rack to cool completely. (About 10 minutes).
Icing Directions:
-Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl mixing on medium speed for 4 minutes. (except your food coloring)
-If icing is not stiff enough add ¼ C powder sugar.
- Leave icing in large bowl. Take out 4 bowls, put ¼ C of icing in three bowl and the rest of the icing in the fourth bowl.
-Bowl #1 remains white, bowl #2 , add several drops of brown gel food coloring stirring well until all of the color is blended. Bowl #3, add several drops of green gel food coloring stirring well until all of the color is blended.
-As for the largest amount of icing add several drops of red gel food coloring in the bowl of icing ... stir well to mix the color. (Red is a difficult color to get so you may have to continue to add the food coloring to get the bright deep red color. That is why we use a gel food color as it doesn't water down the icing.)
-Spoon each of the icings into individual frosting bags with a #5 tips.... twist the open end of the bag to push the icing to the tip.
Whole Red Apple:
-First step for each of the completely red apple cookies is to outline it in red except for the stem and leaf.
-Allow the red outline at least 30 seconds to dry before filling the body of the cookie in with the other red icing*. ( After outlining all of the apple cookies you can push the remaining icing into a bowl and add the 1 teaspoon of water and mix well to get the right consistency.) Using a butter knife to spread it from the outlined part inwards to the center.
-Outline the stem with brown icing on all of the same apple cookies, fill them in with the thinner icing.
-Outline the green leaf with the green icing on all of the same apple cookies, fill them in with the thinner icing.
-Set these aside and allow to completely dry about 4 hours.