Spring cookies

Put 250 g soft butter and 150 g icing sugar in a Mixing bowl and beat both together with the flat beater. Be sure to use icing sugar and not granulated sugar, as this keeps the biscuits nice and smooth.

You should have a creamy mixture, perfect! Add 1 egg and 1 tsp Liquid aroma vanilla and beat everything again.

This is my basic recipe for decorated biscuits. Depending on the season, you can replace the vanilla aroma with lime or orange zest, or with cinnamon or cappuccino aroma.

Finally, add 450 g flour and 1/2 tsp salt and mix briefly on the lowest setting, for no more than 1 minute.

Do the rest by hand and knead as little as possible. A machine would develop the gluten too much, and the biscuits would blister during baking.

Place the dough ball on baking paper and cover it with a second sheet of baking paper so the rolling pin doesn't stick. Roll the dough out to an even thickness of 3 mm using dough guides.

Place the rolled-out dough in the freezer for 5 to 10 minutes. This makes it much easier to cut out.

Preheat the oven to 160 °C fan-assisted. I used various cookie cutters: flowers, ovals, the Mix and Match set for Easter, an egg and a bunny.

For each shaker cookie you need one whole cookie as the base and one with a cut-out centre as the top. You could also fill both sides with Isomalt, but that's quite a lot of sugar.

This recipe makes about 45 cookies, so just over 20 whole ones and 20 with a window, spread over 5 trays. The amount varies depending on the size of your cookie cutters. Place the cookies on a perforated baking sheet with a perforated baking mat, as this helps them bake optimally.

Bake the cookies for 10 to 12 minutes at 160 °C fan-assisted. It's best to bake no more than 2 trays at a time, so they all come out evenly. Then leave the cookies to cool completely on a cake rack.

We make the sugar window from Isomalt. Isomalt is much easier to work with than crystal sugar and only browns at very high temperatures. However, if handled incorrectly it can draw in moisture and turn cloudy. Therefore always follow the instructions on the packaging.

For the Isomalt from ScrapCooking, put the whole bag (250 g) and 50 g of water into a pot.

Melt the Isomalt over low heat to 150 to 160 °C. Be sure to check the temperature with a thermometer.

In the meantime, place the cooled cookies with the centre cut out on a sheet of baking paper. Stir the Isomalt gently so that most of the bubbles rise, then carefully pour it into the centre of the cookies. Let the windows set for at least 10 minutes before moving the cookies.

Caution: Isomalt is very, very hot. Take care not to burn yourself!

And the sugar windows are done! By the way, you can also colour the Isomalt with gel color and leave the cookies as they are, which looks great too.

For assembling and decorating we use royal icing. Put the whole pack (450 g) and 50 g of water into a mixing bowl.

Here the royal icing is piped, so it needs to be firmer than for flooding. Whisk everything for 1 to 2 minutes with the whisk until it forms a firm mass, then divide it into 4 portions.

One portion stays white. Colour the other 3 with gel colors in pastel pink, purple and lime green. Use only a very small amount of colour so that delicate pastel shades result.

To be able to change the piping nozzles, insert an adapter into each piping bag. Push the large part of the adapter into the piping bag, cut off the tip, fit the piping nozzle and screw the ring on top. For this tutorial you only need a 2 mm round piping nozzle and a No. 352 leaf piping nozzle.

Fill the royal icing into 4 small piping bags, push the mass forward with a dough scraper and close the end with a rubber band. Be sure to cover the filled piping bags with a damp cloth so they don't dry out.

Now the cookies are assembled. Use the 2 mm round piping nozzle to pipe small dots all around the whole cookie. The border should be about 1 cm high so that the sprinkles can move around inside it later.

Sprinkle a sprinkles mix and nonpareils inside and place the window cookie on top. My sprinkles mix contained a few large sugar pearls that were too thick to seal: I simply removed them.

Do not shake the cookies while the Royal icing is still wet. Otherwise all the sprinkles will stick together and the shaker effect will be lost.

Instead of dots, you can also simply pipe a band of Royal icing all around the cookie. This is quicker, but I find the dots prettier. Simply decide which you prefer.

So that the cookies don't look so bare, we'll decorate the tops as well. Using the same 2 mm round piping nozzle, pipe 5 small dots in purple and one larger one in white. The longer you press, the larger the dot becomes. Two small leaves are added with leaf piping nozzle no. 352.

With the same round piping nozzle you can also pipe teardrop-shaped petals. The third picture shows two different flowers. I'll show you exactly how this is done in the video.

For the eggs I used the same round piping nozzle to pipe stripes, waves and hearts, and one egg got simple dots. There are no limits to your creativity, there is no right or wrong here. Let everything dry well before you shake the cookies or package them.