Christmas Light Cookies

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup flour, and further for rolling
• 1/2 teaspoon leaven
• pinch of salt
• 1/4 cup tasteless butter, softened
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 teaspoon flavourer

For the small-batch royal icing:

• 1 one/2 cups granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons recent juice
• 1 massive ovalbumin
• For decorating:
• 1 little tube of black icing for writing
• handful mini M&Ms

Instructions

1. In a little bowl, whisk along the flour, leaven and salt.
2. In a medium bowl, beat along with an electrical mixer the butter and sugar. Once light-weight and downy, add the fixings and vanilla and almond extracts.
3. Once well incorporated, sprinkle over 0.5 the flour mixture and beat gently till combined, then sprinkle over the remainder. Beat till no streaks of flour stay, however take care to not over-mix.
4. Dust a clean counter high with flour, and dump the dough out onto it. Gather it into a ball and press it into a 1/2" thick spherical disk. Flour your kitchen utensil, then roll out the dough out sufficiently big to chop out regarding eight shapes. Place the shapes on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a siloxane mat. Gather the dough scraps and re-roll to chop out four a lot of shapes and place them on the cookware. you ought to get twelve cookies.
5. Place the cookware within the deep freezer for the minutes whereas you heat up the kitchen appliance to 350.
6. Once the kitchen appliance is hot, bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, till the sides of the cookies simply begin to show brown. allow them to sit on the sheet a couple of minutes before moving them a wire rack to cool down utterly.
7. Once the cookies area unit cooled utterly, create the royal icing: during a little bowl, mix the granulated sugar and juice.
8. Beat the ovalbumin during a little bowl to loosen them, then make up one's mind two tablespoons of egg whites and add them to the bowl with the sugar.
9. Whisk along the icing, beginning slowly, and trust that the sugar can soften and it'll become liquid. Resist the urge to feature any further liquid to the bowl, and instead simply keep whisk slowly.
10. When the icing comes along, spoon alittle quantity onto every cookie, associated use an off-set spatula to unfold it nearly to the sides.
11. Let the royal icing harden utterly on the cookies before continuing.
12. Pipe 2 skinny black lines onto every cookie, then press mini M&Ms sideways (see photos for reference).