Halloween Sugar Cookies with Eggless Royal Icing

No tricks, just treats!!!!! Happy Halloween

Halloween is an annual feast usually celebrated on October 31 which includes activities like trick-or-treats, costume parties, carving pumpkins, playing and telling scary & horror stories.

To treat this Halloween holiday I made these Sugar Cookies. These cookies are full of flavor, fun to decorate and make a spooktacular display at Halloween parties!!! For this Halloween themed cookies I decorated them as pumpkins, ghosts, black cats.

I enjoyed and had so much fun decorating these Halloween cookies. Isn’t there are scary and cute :)

Ingredients

Sugar Cookies - Nearly 2 dozens cookies

All purpose flour – 2 ½ cups

Unsalted Butter – 1 cup

Superfine Sugar – 1 cup

Egg – 1 no

Egg yolk – 1 no

Vanilla extract – 2 tsps

Salt a pinch

Preparation

• In a large mixing bowl take butter,sugar,salt and mix well until light and fluffy.
• Add the egg yolk and beat until fully integrated.
• Mix in the whole egg, vanilla extract. Mix well.
• Add the flour and mix until combined.
• Divide the dough into three parts and wrap in plastic wrap.
• Store in fridge at least 2 hours and upto 2 days until firm.
• Preheat oven to 350 F. On the floured surface, roll the dough to ¼ inch thick, sprinkling with additional flour or powdered sugar as needed to prevent sticking.
• Use cookies cutters to cut into shapes and place on parchment paper.

• Bake until cookies appear light golden brown on the edges about 10-12 minutes.
• Cool them before decorating.

Eggless Royal Icing

Ingredients:

Icing Sugar – ½ cup

Cornstarch – 1 ½ tsp

Lemon juice – 1 tsp

Food coloring gels – very little

Milk – 2 tsps

Preparation

• In a mixing bowl, sift the sugar, cornstarch together.
• Add lemon juice and milk and mix well until thick paste.
• Divide the Icing into different bowls and add the colors accordingly.
• Keep for 10 minutes.

• We can adjust the icing accordingly based on our requirement. If thin icing is required add a bit of milk or for thick icing add more icing sugar.
• Keep the icing in piping bags or ziplock bags and use them for decorating cookies.

Sending these cookies to Halloween Fiesta hosted by Vardhini, Food Palette Series - Rainbow colors hosted by Akheela , Decorating Challenge - Royal Icing and to my event CC-Festive Food

Wheat Flour & Jaggery Bonda/Sweet Bonda – Diwali Special

Diwali festival is Full of lights, May your life be filled with colors and lights of happiness. 

Wishing All my Friends, Bloggers, Readers and Dear Ones A Very Cheerful and Sparkling Deepavali !!!

Hope you all had/having a great and safe Diwali :)

 @Home

For this Diwali I made this Sweet Bonda which is simple and wonderful dessert and can be prepared easily on special occasions and whenever you want to have some sweet with jaggery.

My mom used to make them very regularly when we were kids as evening snacks and we used to enjoy them after coming back from school.

These are prepared by simple ingredients like Wheat Flour and Jaggery. Adding coconut, rice flour and milk gave a yummy flavor. If we want we can omit them and use water instead of milk. 

If we want crispiness to bondas we can use rice flour, if not we can avoid it. To get better shapes of bonda we can use a deep curved ladle or an icecream scoop to pour the batter into oil.

Ingredients:

Wheat flour – 1 cup

Jaggery grated – ½ cup

Sugar (optional) – 1 tsp

Dry Coconut grated (optional) – 2 tsp

Elachi Powder – a pinch

Milk – 5-6tsps

Water

Salt a pinch

Oil for deep frying

Preparation

• In a wide bowl take wheat flour, add grated jaggery , milk , sugar, elachi powder, coconut, salt and mix well.
• Add little water if required and mix well till the consistency of batter will be like vada batter.
• Keep this mixture aside for 1-2 hrs.
• Heat oil in a pan; pour the batter into it with the help of ladle.
• Cook well on medium flame.
• Fry bonda’s well till golden color and drain them to kitchen towel.

Sending this to Dish it out - Wheat and Jaggery hosted by SouthIndianHome originally started by Vardhini, Serve It - Festival Potluck hosted by Krithi & Denny,  Diwali- Festival of LIGHTS hosted by Anu ,  My Diwali MyWay hosted by Khusi, Only Sweets and Desserts hosted by Gayathri originally started by Pari and to my event CC-Festive Food

CC-What's For Friday Dinner Roundup

I thank one and all for contributing your superb dinner recipes that you girls prefer to cook on Friday evening’s. 

Here are the collections of scrumptious dinner recipes for Friday evening.

I listed them in the order I received.

Ramya from Ramya's Recipes sent this Veg Noodles and Chilly Chiken  a indo-chinese combo which looks very tempting and mouthwatering.

Sumedha from Sumee's Culinary Bites sent this Ginger Shrimp a great dinner treat for sea food lovers.

Richa from Ambrosia sent these delicious cabbage rolls

Amina from Amina Creations sent this colorful and flavorful Corn vegetable rice.

Avika J Chawla from Variety is the Spiceof your life sent this yummy and colorful Forever Biryani.

Nivedita from Eat Right! Live Happy sent this unique and very interesting Tofu Paratha.

Nupur from UK-Rasoi sent these delicious and wonderful entries - Potato Sweet Mash & Red Lentil and Spinach Soup.

Krithika from Krithi's Kitchen sent these lovely and very tempting Szechwan Vegetable Noodles which can be prepared very quickly.

Kishmeesh from Kishmeesh sent these wonderful and delicious Aloo Methi Paratha's

Rudra from Mom's Corner sent these amazing and delicious Aval Aapam & Vermicelli Arrabiata.

Krithi from Krithi's Kitchen send this wonderful and cute Tofu Golden triangles with Hot and Sweet Dipping Sauce.

Ashwini Deshpande from Indulge- Ashscorner send this delicious and healthy entry Whole Wheat wraps with Pausthik.

Sobha Shyam from Good Food sent this yummy and flavorful Vegetable Fried Rice.

Nupur from UK Rasoi sent this delicious and wonderful Pineapple Cardamom Bread.

Julie from Erivumpuliyumm Sent this tempting and amazing Praws Ullarthiyathu.

Kalyani from Kalyani's Platter sent these delicious and flavorful Jeera/Cumin Rice &  Semiya/Vermicelli Pulihora

Finally my own entry Green Veggie Biryani

Thanks to all, Please accept this Thank you Note !!

Please check out this month's event CC-Festive Food. Waiting for your wonderful entries !! 

Badhusha – My 100th post - Diwali Special

Hooray for my 100^th post!! Wow what a journey it has been. I am so excited about this little milestone!!

I really never thought I can make these many kinds of recipes, but over the last 6 months, I have exposed a love to baking, tried many new recipes first time, organized some foodie events, and met so many inspirational and lovely bloggers of whom some have already became friends!! I love reading all your comments and you all inspire me to carry on.

I wanted to say a heartfelt thankyou to all my friends, followers, bloggers and readers. And I am very grateful to my sweet hubby who supports and helps in my cooking.

To celebrate this small milestone, I prepared badhusha. I learnt this recipe from Raks kitchen. 

Badhusha is an Indian festive Sweet made easily with available ingredients of flour and sugar. First time I made these Badhusha’s and I enjoyed making those shapes. They came out so soft and I and my hubby enjoyed them a lot.

Initially I taught it is very difficult to make, but when I decided to prepare I felt it is very easy and infact I made it on weekday after coming from work within 1 hour, enjoyed making them :)

Source : Rak's Kitchen

Ingredients:

All purpose flour/Maida – 1 ½ cups

Butter – ¼ cup

Ghee – 8 tsps

Curd – 1 ½ tsp

Baking Soda – 2 pinches

Sugar – ½ tsp

Water – ¼ cup

Oil for deep Frying

For Syrup:

Sugar – ½ cup

Water – little

Elachi powder – ¼ tsp

Lemon juice – 1 tsp

Preparation

• Melt butter in microwave and keep aside.
• In a wide bowl, add ghee,sugar,baking soda,curd and whisk it to mix well.
• Later add flour and mix well without lumps.

• Add water slowly and mix well to make a smooth dough.
• Keep the dough aside and covered it with wet cloth for 15 mins.
• Boil water with sugar and elachi to make thick syrup. Remove from heat and keep aside.
• Divide the dough into small lemon sized balls.
• Take a ball, flatten slightly and twist the sides using fingertips decoratively and shape the edges.
• Prepare all the balls and keep aside by covering them.
• Heat oil in a frying pan.  Add some badhushas into oil. Remove from heat and let it cooked for 5 mins.
• Later the badushas float on top, again switch on the heat and cook on medium flame for another 5 mins or till they turn golden color.

• Drain them in paper towel and immediately put them into the sugar syrup for about 5 mins and serve in a plate.
• Sprinkle nuts or dry coconut and serve !!

Sending this to Serve It - Festival Potluck hosted by Krithi & Denny, Diwali Special - Sweets & Savories hosted by Radhika,  Diwali- Festival of LIGHTS hosted by Anu,My Diwali MyWay hosted by Khusi, Bookmarked Recipes hosted by Priya, and to my event CC-Festive Food, Only Sweets and Desserts hosted by Gayathri originally started by Pari