How To Make Spring Bunny Sugar Cookies

Why should you make spring bunny sugar cookies? The truth is, I could come up with 30 reasons to celebrate with these cookies, but we will limit it to 3 for the sake of efficiency. Number 1: Cookies are for any celebration. Seriously, there is never a time when a cookie does not ‘fit’ into a celebration because there are so many variations. Number 2: Sugar cookies are delicious whether you decorate them or not. Number 3: Kids can run outside with a bunny cookie in hand and enjoy the sunshine!

And we think bunnies say Spring like nothing else! After doing some research for the perfect sugar cookie recipe, we were discouraged. All of them suggested that you refrigerate the dough for a long time. Perhaps we were under a time crunch as perhaps we had played outside too long before we remembered our Mom had told us hours ago to start baking. Now what?

Do you Have to Chill Sugar Cookie Dough?

We finally found a recipe that implied if we used cold butter right out of the refrigerator that we could roll it out right away. What a relief! As soon as we started cutting the butter into cubes, our dog thought we were cutting cheese and started begging. Poor thing! There was no way we were giving her butter.

We then tried to cream the butter with the sugar. Our mixer was jumping all over the place with the cold butter trying to break it down. Now some more timid cooks would slow it down and make sure everything was alright. But not us. We just turned it up really high to see if it would work better.

After a few minutes, we realized we may have overdone it. Our butter never really, ‘whipped.’ It looked pretty hard. But time was ticking so we soldiered on.

After adding the rest of the ingredients, we cut the dough in half and started rolling it out. As you can see, we ran into some trouble.

The dough just kept sticking to the rolling pin! We put more flour on and tried again, but this was not going as well as we had hoped.

After a good amount of flour and some careful rolling, we were able to use our bunny cookie cutter to make our cookies. We lined out baking sheets with a silicone mat and thought we would just lift them with a spatula. This did not go as well as we had hoped! They all stuck to the cutting board and we had to ever so carefully pry them off without breaking them apart.

Using the Cooled Dough:

To answer the question above, we have concluded that usually when 90% of recipes say to do something, it is most likely a good idea. While we were struggling with the first half of the dough, we put the other half in the refrigerator. When we rolled out the second half, we were surprised at just how easy it was. It was only in there for about 15 minutes, but it made rolling, shaping, and transferring the bunny cookies a thousand times easier. While we are so thankful for this quick recipe, we will chill our dough at least for a short time in the refrigerator the next time we make sugar cookies.

Should You Frost Spring Bunny Sugar Cookies?

These bunny cookies came out of the oven looking wonderful. We let them cool and realized that we had run out of time to decorate them for our thank you gifts. They were still very cute on their own and packaged easier without any frosting.

By some miracle, we managed to keep our Dad from eating all the leftovers and decided to decorate what we had left. The goal was to find a recipe for a frosting that would harden and not have the same texture as cake frosting.

If you know anything about us by now, you know that our Mom avoids corn syrup (especially in cereal) as much as possible. Who knew that is what made the wonderful sheen on cookie frosting? We knew if we kept looking we would find a healthier option. The recipe that we found only used the same ingredients that we used in our Mom’s Birthday Cake, but with different amounts.

We started to cream the butter again, but this time with more milk. It did not look good!

But the recipe said to just keep going and add the powdered sugar. In the end, it looked much better than when we started.

Next, we decided to divide it into four small bowls so we could experiment with different colors. Mom came up to discuss something about science, but we tuned her out and mixed away.

I am not sure if we used the perfect amount of sugar, or if there was something about our combination, but our frosting did look pretty textured.

We figured it would dry more smoothly, so we started the fun of decorating our bunnies. It was so much fun!

Although the recipe says you can add milk if it starts to harden too quickly, we had the opposite problem. It seemed pretty soft, and even after a couple of hours, it never hardened the way we had hoped. Possibly we did not add enough powered sugar?

Regardless, these spring bunny sugar cookies make us want to celebrate Spring!