Cookie Tin Cookie: a mini cookie tin, made of cookie, assembled, iced, and then filled with even more miniature butter cookies. Glorious.
Making the “Tin”
I’ve made cookie containers before. I’ve made cookie bowls, a cookie box…this is the first time I made a tin. Had I planned a bit better, I might have had better materials. But sometimes constraints lead to more creative solutions. I can definitely say I got creative with this one! To start, I needed a couple concentric circles for the lid to secure it to the base and give it a closed look. Two cutters fit the bill, and that pretty much dictated the size of my cookie tin.
For the base, I knew I needed some sort of structural foundation to keep the shape while it baked. So I scoured my kitchen for anything that could be baked inside. It couldn’t be tapered, and had to be oven-safe. I finally stumbled across my 1/2 cup measuring cup. It was a bit shorter than I had hoped, but I did the trick. Level off the cylinder base while the cookie is still warm, as it’s the only time it will be easily cuttable. Unfortunately, on this day my dough was extra crumbly. (Probably due to an extra cup of flour. I can make these cookies in my sleep, but if I don’t count the cups of flour out loud, I always end up with an extra cup.)
The awesome thing about working with royal icing is that it’s perfect for construction, but also for covering mistakes. I like a soft sugar cookie, so I often bake mine as little as necessary, which sometimes means they break easily. A little dab of royal icing will always pull things together. The base of my cookie tin was looking pretty rough by the time I “trimmed it” and pulled it out of the mold (I may have also been working a bit too quickly). It also ended up a tad bit too small for the base that I had cut. Royal icing to the rescue.
I covered the cookie with piping icing. It doesn’t dry as smooth as flood or 20-second icing, but it’s thick enough to hold its shape so that I don’t have to come up with some rotisserie setup just to get it perfect. And even though it’s not perfectly smooth, most of the imperfections aren’t terribly noticeable once the decorations are added.
Improvements
Whenever I finish a bake, I always, always, always try to think of things that I could’ve done better.
- When baking the cylinder cookie, I thought it would be helpful to have some excess cookie at the top to allow a little room for error. But I think it actually created the error. If I were to do it again, before baking I would level off both the cookie and the parchment right up to my base. This would make it much easier to trim once it comes out of the oven (which has to be done quickly, while the cookie is still warm).
- I trimmed the cylinder when I brought it out of the oven, but I should’ve also re-punched my circles (the lid and the base). This would’ve both reshaped my perfect circle, as well as remove any excess cookie that spread during baking.
- The flood icing used on the lid was supposed to be much much thinner. I was aiming for a translucent look that you get when you use a super thin icing, as seen here in these Japanese Pattern Cookies.
The Finished Cookie
Happy baking, friends.
