Last week, The Cooking Virgin whipped up a tasty batch of frothy, alcoholic Butterbeer in celebration of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. But the Potter endgame isn't the only geek-flick to hit the big screen this summer. Comic book fans are equally stoked for the release of Marvel's Captain America: The First Avenger, which opens in theaters this Friday.
So World War II's greatest hero wouldn't feel left out, we tracked down Hungry Rabbit's sweet recipe for patriotic, shield-shaped cookies and tweaked it, Virgin-style. The process was labor intensive, and the results... well, about as surprising as the moment when you find out that the Captain's big-time Nazi nemesis is actually an inhumanly strong dude with a mug to rival Darkman's.
How to make Captain America cookies, after the jump.
:
- 2 eggs
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 10 ounces softened butter
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp lemon juice (optional)
- 3 cups white flour
- red and blue food coloring
- white frosting (for star)
The Virgin's DeStructions:
1. Place white flour in a large mixing bowl and add softened butter, egg and sugar. Stir until well-mixed. Ideally, you'd use a stand mixer here to form the dough. But if all you've got is a pitiful $12 Walmart hand mixer, you'll burn that thing out in minutes. So instead, I opted to burn my hand out by mixing the dough with a spoon. When that fails, screw the spoon and get your hands dirty kneading the dough.
2. Add vanilla and lemon juice and knead, baby, knead, until a semi-stiff dough forms (or if you're smart, buy pre-mixed cookie dough in a package or box and start just with step #3.)
3. Separate the dough into 4 equal sized dough balls. Place the first ball in your mixing bowl and add 10-12 drops of blue food coloring. Use your mixer, if available, or get dirty with the ghetto hand-kneading method and prepare to end up looking like an extra in Avatar. Knead the dough until the blue coloring is even.
4. Spread a sheet of plastic wrap on counter or cutting board and hand roll the ball into an elongated tube shape. Tip: If you have a bud vase or something similar, you can push the plastic-wrapped dough into the tube and chill to get the proper shape. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot.
8. Roll out the remaining uncolored dough ball into a flat sheet about 1/4 inch thick. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for an hour or so.
9. Remove dough from fridge and cut the red dough into 2 rectangles of similar size. Trim the white dough the same way.
10. Take a red dough sheet and wrap it around the blue tube, sealing the ends. Do the same with the white dough, and then the red again.
11. Chill the whole log for one hour.
12. Cut into circles with a sharp knife and bake at 375 degrees for 9-10 minutes.
13. Cool and stencil or pipe stars onto cookies (alternatively, if you have a tiny star cookie cutter you can cut stars from the extra dough and "glue" them to the cookies with frosting after baking).
: Our version of the shield cookies yielded soft, chewy and delicious treats, despite a few snags along the way. The stars weren't as slick looking as Hungry Rabbit's mini cookies, but the addition of basic vanilla buttercream frosting gave the cookie a richer flavor.The only flaw was that the layers of our shield pulled apart a little at the seams, owing to the fact Cooking Virgin unwisely skipped the addition of egg whites between layers. Brush the gelatinous whites on each layer of your Captain America shield cookies and your recipe will be as bulletproof as the real thing.
