Recently, we were asked by the local cable company, Shaw TV, to come and do an interview with us while I baked with one of the hosts, James Farnan. I agreed immediately, as we had worked with both of the crew members before, and James happens to be our neighbour. We know that he likes to mow the lawn at 10:30 PM- when we’re trying to film- and it’s dark! Who does that?? Just James. It must be an Australian thing. He’s awesome! We had a great time filming and joking with each other!
When we started our baking business, way back in 2011/12, Shaw TV came to interview us back then. We did the interview in the kitchen space we were renting, so this time, we were all crammed into our kitchen, both filming a video for our respective channels. Shaw TV will have their piece airing on local television during the week before Christmas, and they’ll also have their video uploaded to their YouTube channel at that time.
Making this sugar cookie Christmas Tree is skill wise quite simple, but it does take a day or so to bake, ice and allow to dry. So plan accordingly. It is an excellent activity that can be done with kids, as they can take part in the recipe creation, cutting and rolling of the cookies, as well as the decorating portions.
The first task is to cut out the cookies. Each cutter (there are 10 of them) need to be used twice, to cut out 2 cookies per star size, so all in all, you will be icing 20 star cookies. You can ice them with royal icing like I did, or you could use buttercream. I chose royal icing as I wanted to have a more smooth look to my tree, but if you’re doing this activity with kids, you could easily use buttercream for them to decorate with.
Once the icing has dried, the next step is to stack the tree, and this is done from largest cut out, to the smallest one. Each star should be offset on the previous star. In order to “glue” the stars together, place a small dollop of royal icing in between each cookie. Once it is dried, you can wrap a small line of LED battery operated Christmas lights around the tree, and continue to decorated as you wish. In order to get larger “ornaments” onto the tree, I used melted green chocolate as the royal icing wasn’t strong enough.
Hopefully you enjoy this Christmas treat!
