December 27, 2014
Sophia came to Grammy’s house to make her winning vanilla bean sugar cookies! She won the dessert contest! This is a recipe from another Southern Living Christmas book. (Those books have some of my favorite recipes.) This is my favorite sugar cookie, loaded with vanilla beans, vanilla extract, and vanilla sugar, which I make with leftover vanilla beans. ( I use only the real thing! The imitation vanilla has a funny taste, especially if you over do it.)
Someone once told me she had bought vanilla sugar, which caught my attention. I had never heard of it. Investigating, I found that it was just sugar flavored with a vanilla bean! I am sure she paid quite a bit for that little bit of sugar. Now, we have a plastic container filled with sugar and vanilla beans.
After I scrape out the vanilla bean seeds, I put the bean pods in the sugar container. When I use the flavored sugar, I replace regular sugar for any used and have vanilla sugar on hand every day. There are so many uses for it and if you don’t have vanilla on hand, and the recipe calls for sugar, it can be used instead. Stir it into your coffee or hot chocolate, top cookies or muffins before baking. I am sure you can come up with other ideas.
Sophia helped stir up the cookies, cut out and bake them. She decorated them herself. Although I usually use white chocolate to frost these, this time we made a simple icing with powdered sugar, milk, clear Karo syrup, and vanilla.
We displayed them on a footed cake plate. I overheard her telling her mother that her cookies were on a ‘fancy plate’!
To see some of the other desserts and more about the contest, click here. Do you have a dessert contest at your celebration?
