She Ate America

The 4th of July is on Saturday, so this week feels red, white and blue all over. Kevin decided that he wants homemade ice cream for the actual holiday, and I was quick to comply because not only has it been a long time since we’ve made ice cream, but right now we can use actual dairy products! But the ice cream won’t be in patriotic colors, and I found that I was feeling a bit deprived by the lack of food coloring. So today I whipped up a batch of spritz cookies and made good use of said food coloring to make some patriotic cookies. 

But there was a learning curve to making tri-colored spritz cookies. The dough obviously needs to be soft enough to work in a cookie press, but when it was freshly mixed, it was so soft that the colors mushed all together and I ended up with a purplish tie dye effect, which was not what I was aiming for. Being a fairly experienced cookie baker, I chilled the dough and then shaped it into logs which yielded better results in that the tie die was now red, white and blue. I was happier with that but thought if I popped the dough in the freezer for a few minutes, I could get more clearly defined colors. While that approach worked, the dough was too stiff to actually come out of the press, so I ended up needing to wait about half an hour for the dough to warm back up to room temperature.

The end results were rather surprising for me. The very first purplish cookies were my least favorite because as lovely a color as it is, purple just doesn’t evoke patriotic thoughts. The last cookies with the clearly defined areas of red, white and blue were next in line going from least to most preferred. I thought I would like those the most and was somewhat surprised that I didn’t. My favorite cookies were the ones created in the middle of this adventure, the ones with three distinct American colors in a variety of tie dyed and speckled forms. 

As for Malia, she got to lick four beaters and scrape out three cookie dough bowls, so she was a happy camper. She says that she ate America.