my baking diary #21 butter cookies

this is gonna be a short post... these Mickey butter cookies, along with the Horlick Doggies, are packed into sweet little cookies bags (i forgot to take pictures of those, coz it was nearly 2am by the time i was done packing!) are going to friends/schoolmates of little XN... She turns 3 today! Happy Birthday XN!!

for these butter cookies, i used Sugar Inc's 'reduced sugar butter cookies' since these are meant for kids... as you will need to subscribe to Sugar Inc's mailing list in order to get the recipe, i am not going to post it here... if you would like to try this out, do subscribe to Sugar Inc's mailing list, here.


i made some slight adjustments to the recipe, which includes further reducing the amount of sugar required since these are meant for 3 years old kiddies, as well as lowering the temperature coz i would prefer a lighter golden brown shade....

and a lesson i learnt from this attempt (and from Jess), when the instructions call for chilling of dough to firm it up before cutting out the desired shape, do roll the dough between plastic sheets before chilling them! maybe i am the only one who really follow the instructions, i.e. chill the dough before rolling it to the desired thickness... but by rolling it before chilling, it is really much easier to handle! i used the same recipe when i made the butter cookies in Jan for XH's birthday... but i remember i had to flour the cutters everytime i wanna cut of the cookies, and trying to lift the baking paper from the sticky dough... this time round, i used plastic sheets instead and did not even have to flour my cutters! when you first roll the dough between the plastic sheets, it might stick a little... but after its chilled, the plastic sheet comes up clean when you lift it off the dough. so, this is how i am going to roll and chill my cookies from now on!

i would like to get some views from fellow bakers on how much these cookies should be priced... just plucking a figure and based on what i calculate for this order, if 3 butter cookies alone in a cookie bag, i thought $1 per bag is quite a reasonable price, with say a minimum order of 30 bags (since this will be the rough number of cookies i get from 1 recipe)... For non-bakers, like one of my colleague, they seem to find it a tad too pricey... but i do have to spend a fair bit of time cutting the cookies and making sure the prints are in place and comes out nice...

What's your view? I am not turning my baking hobby into a business, but just wanna gather some info coz other colleagues are asking me to bake for their kids' birthday...

(erm, so this post is not as short as i thought it will be :P )