Canning Jar Cookies

I love to bake, and I love to play around with decorating cookies. They always taste great, but I am not that great at the decorating part! But practice makes perfect, right? That was my thinking anyway, so I decided to make a batch of sugar cookies and some icing and practice a little. No pressure either, these were just going to be staying homes so it didn't matter if they looked perfect or not.

I started with all of the standard baking ingredients.

Mixed them all together

Dough was divided, then wrapped in plastic wrap to chill for at least an hour. I have tried to rush this part in the past and that never works for me, so make sure it stays in the fridge for at least an hour or you might just have a mess on your hands. 

Another tip that helps me is to divide each of those halves into thirds and keep the dough that I am not using in the fridge, that way it doesn't start to get too warm. That makes sure that all the dough stays cold and it is much easier to work with.

Here is one of my favorite tips for making sugar cookies. Recipes will say to roll out the dough on a floured surface. For these cookies, I will sprinkle SUGAR on my mat. I think it is easier to lift the cookies and they keep all that sweetness that a sugar cookie should have.

I have been participating in some swaps with one of the canning pages I follow on Facebook. The latest swap I joined was for cookie cutters. Since it is a canning page swap, I got the idea in my head that I wanted to make cookies that looked like a canning jar. When I went shopping for the cookie cutters to send, I couldn't find anything that looked like a canning jar. The store I was shopping in has an amazing selection, but no canning jar shapes. I decided to try using a baby bottle to see if I could get the shape I was trying to make.

After cutting out each bottle, I took a butter knife and lopped off the nipple of each bottle.

My final product: 

After I loaded the picture, I noticed that the icing was noticeably wet! I need to keep working on my decorating because they aren't as neat as I would like them to be, but I was able to make a mason jar!