Hedgehog Cookies

Hi friends! Christmas just passed, how fast, my previous post was just about Christmas still being a month away and before you know it, Christmas is over. Next would be the New Year! 2014 has been a great year for me, I hope 2015 would be just as good!
Anyway, today's post would be a baking one. I baked cookies today and designed them into cute little hedgehogs! Without further ado, here is how you make your own army of hedgehogs!

Ingredients:
75g of butter (softened)
30g of icing sugar (aka confectioner's sugar)
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
85g of all purpose flour (aka plain flour)
A pinch of salt

For decoration:
Nutella
Digestive biscuit/peanuts
Rainbow sprinkles

(Makes about 45 little bite sizes hedgehogs) (How many hedgehogs you can make completely depends on how big you want yours to be)

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 170 Degrees Celsius.

2. Using a mixer (mixing with a spoon/spatula is fine too), cream together butter and icing sugar. Before you do this, leave butter at room temperature to soften.

3. Add in vanilla essence and mix well.

4. Sieve in flour and salt into the mixture in batches. (Do not sieve everything all at once, sieve a little, mix, then sieve a little again and mix)


By now your batter should look like this! Not too wet and not too dry :-)

5. Shape the cookie batter into little teardrop shapes. For mine, I've shaped them bitesized. Do not flatten the dough, they should be roundish.

6. Bake at 170 degrees for 12-15 minutes or until they've turned golden brown. The shape of the cookie should stay if your batter is correct.
You will have yourself a batch of teardrop shaped cookies!

7. Time for decoration! For my hedgehog, i used digestive biscuits as I'm not a fan of peanuts.You can use peanuts if you'd like, but for now everything would be digestive biscuits :-)
Crush the digestive biscuit into fine crumbs and leave in a small bowl (I used 2 digestive biscuits but was left with quite a bit so i suggest using 1 first)

8. Using nutella, spread over the rounded area of the teardrop shaped cookie. (I was supposed to use melted chocolate for this but the chocolate hardened even before I could spread it) (you can use peanut butter or whatever spread you like, as long as it is stiff enough to stay)

9. After doing the 'body' of the hedgehog, using a toothpick, draw 2 small dots as the hedgehog's eyes and a bigger oval for the nose, see image.
















10. This was how big my hedgehog was a compared to my hand! They were bitesized, I like bitesized snacks eheh. One tip would be to make them bitesized as these are butter cookies and eating too much of them at once may not feel very nice.
Also, you can use whatever you'd like to make the 'spines' of the hedgehog. For example, I've also used rainbow sprinkles as seen from the image :-)

I hope this blog post has been helpful! These little hedgehog cookies would make a great gift for any occasion! Valentine's day is in 1.5 months! Some ideas would be try making a girly hedgehog and a male one ! :-)