The Blegen Bunch: Easter!

It's Easter Sunday! I think that now that I am too old for the Easter bunny, I have been for a while now, that I have been able to get a lot more out of Easter Sunday than those years when I just sat anxiously through church to get home to see what was in store for me in my Easter basket. This Sunday I got the privilege of teaching the Easter Sunday lesson to our class, Ryan and I teach the 6-8 year olds it is a combined class in our ward. I was able to feel the spirit testify to me that what I was teaching to these children about Christ and his resurrection were true and I know that these things are true.

These past few months teaching these kids have been such amazing months and I am so grateful for the opportunity that Ryan and I had to teach them and to share our testimonies with them and to have them share their testimonies and lights with us. Children are so precious and innocent and they are truly gifts from God!

This week was unfortunately our last week in the Southbury ward and I am very sad about that because I love these kids so much. For our last Sunday I wanted to do something special for the kids because they have been so good and so I decided to make them all a special Easter treat and I think they turned out so well, here is what I made:

Easter Basket Cookies

You will need:
-Licorice Rope, any kind I could only find the twizzlers rope and I peeled them apart
-Life Savers
-Different colored sprinkles, as many as you want
-Jelly beans
-Sugar cookie dough
-Icing (not in the picture I made this after the cookies had cooled)

I also ended up using muffin tins and pam so those are things you should also keep handy plus ingredients for the sugar cookies and icing but those will come up later.

First you need to make the sugar cookie dough. I used a recipe that I found from foodnetwork.com .

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon milk
Powdered sugar, for rolling out dough

Directions

Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Place butter and sugar in large bowl of electric stand mixer and beat until light in color. Add egg and milk and beat to combine. Put mixer on low speed, gradually add flour, and beat until mixture pulls away from the side of the bowl. Divide the dough in half, wrap in waxed paper, and refrigerate for 2 hours.

After it has been 2 hours or more take the cookie dough out of the fridge and roll into balls. I rolled my balls so they were a perfect size for the mini muffin tins that I used. When my mom and I were rolling the dough into balls she used a cookie scoop and you can do that if you want it helps to keep it less messy but I just estimated the sizes and made them with my hands, either way works.

You should now spray your muffin tins with pam so the cookies don't stick while they are baking.

Now you are going to roll the balls of dough in sprinkles! This is a very messy process but it was fun.

After you have rolled them all you should put them in the muffin tins and they should look like this:

I'm not sure if this next step is necessary or not but I probably wouldn't do this recipe again without doing this step again because it makes things later on easier. We used a melon baller to push in the center of the balls to make the inside of the basket.

Then I put them in the oven for about 10-15 minutes but I wasn't paying too close attention you would have to estimate when to take them out but they shouldn't take more than 20 minutes. While they were in the oven I put a hand full of lifesavers in a food processor to chop them up really small.

Then right after the cookies came out of the oven we pushed the centers in again with the melon baller because they had gone up when cooking.

While you are letting the cookies cool you are going to need to make icing which my mom made a simple icing with milk, powdered sugar and vanilla and she made it to taste and to a texture she liked but you can find plenty of recipes online. After the cookies have cooled and you have made the icing you will put a little bit of icing in each cookie center, we filled them to the top but no further than that.

Now you right away you will put the crushed up lifesavers on top of the icing, you can also used shaved coconut here but I liked the life savers, to make it look like the colorful grass you put in Easter baskets. After that you stick in the licorice ropes in the icing on either side of the inside of the cookie, make them to a size you like, and put a couple jelly beans in to represent eggs. This is what your finished cookie Easter basket will look like, hopefully even better!