st. patty's day cookies

I checked the freezer.

We were out of ice cream.

And it was an ice cream kinda day.

I eat ice cream most days.

But especially on my bad days.

The tough days.

The cry-till-your-eyes-are-puffy days.

Necessity breeds invention.

And I needed a major soul-nourishing treat.

Realizing that large doses of sugar consumption should be included.

I turned to my Gramma's famous sugar cookie recipe.

But yesterday I was lazy.

Like....really lazy.

I didn't want to put the dough in the fridge for 30 minutes.

I didn't want to flour a cutting board and roll the dough out.

I didn't care about cutting out shapes.

I just wanted to eat some cookies.

A lot of them.

Now.

Can you tell I'm really big into instant gratification?

Just blame it on my generation.  Generation X, that is.

So here's my solution:

 I whipped up the sugar-cookie dough.

Added in some green food coloring.

I scooped out the dough (about 1 rounded TBL) with my small Pampered Chef scoop.

I plopped it in a dish of sugar.

I proceeded to completely cover the ball of dough in sugar {mmmm...sugar}.

 I then put each sugar-coated ball of dough onto my cookie sheet about 2" apart.

I pressed each ball of dough down so it was flat and about 1/2" thick.
(I used one of my fondant tools, but using the bottom of a drinking glass works just as well!)

I placed them in the oven and baked them for about 9 minutes.

(Your oven may cook differently than mine, so be sure to pop in on them every so often to check and adjust as needed.)

You want them to be **slightly** browned on the bottom.

Transfer to a cooling rack.

 Now you could just eat them this way.

Which would be super lazy easy and just as yummy.

But that little leprechaun bit me.

and I decided it would be nice to go one step further.

 I had some left over icing in the fridge from a birthday cake I just made the other day for a friend.

So I took it out of the fridge when I started making the cookies;

 this way it would be the right consistency when I would eventually need to use it.

I kept it in the plastic zip-loc bag I had originally stored it in,

snipped a small portion off the corner

and used that as my "pastry-bag".

I hand sketched a four-leaf clover

(you could just print off one from your computer's clip-art collection, too)

and cut it out (see picture below).

I used it as a guide to draw a clover onto each cookie.

And, voila!

My sugar therapy fix come to life:

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

66° Rainy and wet.