Galaxy Cookies

Today's recipe is brought to you by my mom's old and falling apart Betty Crocker cookbook.  I remember her making these when my brother, sister, and I were really young and I still think they're just great.  If you've got kids (or steal someone else's kids), this can be a fun recipe to make with them. 

So, get out 1/2 cup butter (softened), 3/4 cup confectioners' sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla, food coloring, 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/8 teaspoon salt, and a bunch of cherries, chocolate pieces, nuts, of whatever you feel like putting in these cookies.  And while you're at it, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Mix together your butter, sugar and vanilla.  You can do this with a wooden spoon, but I personally recommend using an electric mixer (or your stand mixer for you fancy-shmancy people).  Add in a few drops of your food coloring, too, to make your dough pretty.  Or you can leave it all dull.

Booooring beige

Beautiful blue!

Pretty pink!

Now gradually work in your flour and salt until your dough looks rather like the above pictures.  If the dough is too dry (and mine always is), add in some milk, a tablespoon at a time, until it comes together.  Mold the dough around whatever it is you've decided to put in the middle and roll it into balls.  You're going to have a different number of cookies depending on what you decide to put in them.  I made two batches; one with peanut butter cups inside (blue), the other with maraschino cherries (pink). 

As you can see, I ended up with quite a few more cherry-filled cookies than peanut butter cup ones.  Anyway, put your cookies about an inch or so apart on your cookie sheets and bake them for 12-15 minutes, until they are set but NOT browned.  Really, what would have been the point of making them pretty colors if you turned them brown in the oven?

Once they're cooked, cool them completely and make your icing.  You'll need 1 cup confectioners' sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and food coloring.

And all the sprinkles the grocery store had in stock

Just mix your ingredients until smooth.  Now just slap some icing on your cookies and you're done!  Of course, you can get really fancy here, using all kinds of different colors and piping designs on the cookies.  Or, you can be lazy like me, make one color of icing, and dump all kinds of different sprinkles on the icing before it hardens.  It's your call.  And this is probably the part of the process that those kids you came into possession of at the beginning of this post can really have fun with.  Just put your cookies on a rack over a cookie sheet and let them go nuts!

You, too, can have delicious blurry cookies!!