These would make a great gift for a teacher! Start the school year off right! Make it even more meaningful by having your children help you make these cookies for their teacher!

Cookies

Cookie Ingredients: 

5 C flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 C soft unsalted butter
2 C granulated sugar
4 eggs
Mini Apple cutter

Cookie Directions: 

– Cream the soft butter with the sugar until the combination is smooth not grainy to the touch in a mixing bowl.
-Add all 4 eggs at one time…Continue to mix. -Add the vanilla.. Continue mixing.
-Sift the four, baking powder, and salt together.
-Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture.
-Continue mixing to make sure all ingredients are thoroughly blended.
-Make the dough into a ball, wrap it in cling wrap completely covering the entire dough ball.
-Put in the refrigerator for about 6 hours or overnight. Check to see if the dough is firm.
-Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
-Pull the cookie dough out of the refrigerator and sit it out to soften up a bit.
– Put flour out on the wood cutting board, rub flour on the rolling pin, and work some flour into the batter.
-Roll the dough out on the cutting board and using your MINI APPLE cookie cutter begin to make your cookies.
-Line the cookie sheet with parchment paper.
-Using a metal spatula move the cut cookie  to the parchment lined cookie sheet.
-Bake at 325 degrees for 8 minutes.  Check to see if the cookie are thoroughly baked.
-Take the cookies off of the cookie sheet and put on a wire rack to cool completely.  (About 10 minutes).

Royal Icing:

Icing Ingredients:

2 egg whites
1 C powder sugar
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
Red, brown, green gel food coloring

Icing Directions:

-Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl mixing on medium speed for 4 minutes. (except your food coloring)
-If icing is  not stiff enough add 1/4 C powder sugar.
– Leave icing in large bowl. Take out 4 bowls, put 1/4 C of icing in three bowl and the rest of the icing in the fourth bowl.
-Bowl #1 remains white, bowl #2 , add several drops of brown gel food coloring stirring well until all of the color is blended. Bowl #3, add several drops of green gel food coloring stirring well until all of the color is blended.
-As for the largest amount of icing add several drops of red  gel food coloring in the bowl of icing … stir well to mix the color. (Red is a difficult color to get so you may have to continue to add the food coloring to get the bright deep red color.  That is why we use a gel food color as it doesn’t water down the icing.)
-Spoon each of the icings into individual  frosting bags with a #5 tips…. twist the open end of the bag to push the icing to the tip.

Whole Red Apple:

-First step for each of the completely red apple cookies is to  outline it in red except for the stem and leaf.
-Allow the red outline  at least  30 seconds to dry before filling the  body of the cookie in with the other red icing*. ( After outlining all of the apple cookies you can push the remaining icing into a bowl and add the 1 tsp of water and mix well to get the right consistency.) Using a butter knife to spread it from the outlined part inwards to the center.
-Outline the stem with brown icing on all of the same apple cookies, fill them in with the thinner icing.
-Outline the green leaf with the green icing on all of the same apple cookies, fill them in with the thinner icing.
-Set these aside and allow to completely dry about 4 hours.

Mason Jar:

-After mini cookies have completely dried place them individually into a mason jar