SnaG Trilogy Part Three: Briosca*
Or rather, shamrocks of the sugary kind…
Saturday baking came earlier this week as Daughter-Kate was enlisted to bring biscuits, er sorry…cookies, to school on Friday, a shortened party day in anticipation of upcoming St. Patrick’s Day and the two-week-end-of-term-Easter-holiday. So, what else would I bake but sugar cookie shamrocks?
As I hunt for the shamrock cookie cutter, which I am absolutely positively sure that I own I realise, after an exasperating search, that…oops, I was wrong. Cutters of all shapes and sizes but no shamrock. Rats. What am I gonna do? For crying out loud, I live in the country now and can’t just hop in the car to the nearest Cookie-Cutters-R-Us! Grrrr….
Right, not to be undone by this setback, I dig around for Irishy alternatives.
Gingerbread-Men-Turned-Leprechaun?
Jumping-Reindeer-Disguised-As-The-Island?
Santa-Incognito-As-A-Pudgy-St. Patrick?
Aha! The simplest solution found an unused circle scone cutter reshaped into a trefoil…love the power of pliers…
Admittedly the dough shapes looked a little shaky but the magic of baking covers a multitude of cookie cutting sins.
The icing…green, of course. Didn’t have any store bought sugar sprinkles, but substituted granulated sugar whizzed with a bit of green food colouring.
Apologies, Irish Cultural Baking Diversion:
The icing which is found here is a mysterious entity to me, the North American baker. The icing in Ireland, or the British Isles, or even perhaps Europe is usually that hard-roll-it-out-to-form-fit-the-cake type stuff and to be honest…it scares me a little. I admit I have never used it as the thought of it gives my hands little tremors. Where’s the fluffy frosting that I’m used to?
So, you will appreciate my relief when, a few years ago, this little familiar package finally made it to Irish supermarket shelves….and so my sugar cookies are saved!
Ah, baking is done and I’ve got plenty of sugary shamrocks for Kate’s class…and Alex’s…and the Infants class…the entire school, actually…yep, it’s a small school.
*english = ‘biscuit’
Great idea to make your own shamrocks. And since St. Pat’s day as a celebration is originally American and then traveled to Ireland (hopefully without the green beer) then it is fitting that the shamrocks are iced with Betty Crocker icing. Thus making your cookies the perfect Irish biscuit. Love it!
13 Mar 2008 at 4:02 am
very impressive shamrock cutter! ma ingalls has nothing on you! and they look great. hope everyone loves them.
13 Mar 2008 at 7:28 am
too bad my daughter and I are not sweets eaters because those little shamrock cookies are really cute. As far as icing is concerned in France, I don’t think we put much icing on our cakes/tarts/cookies…
13 Mar 2008 at 9:08 am
Yes they don´t go in for Icing in Spain much either, but marzipan, Wow that´s another story! They have entire isles in the supermarkets dedicated to it at Christmas time!
13 Mar 2008 at 11:41 am
You get the A For Effort reward. I would have just used the green sugar before baking and be done with it. I figure most of the cookie is going to end up on the floor anyway (this from the woman who made her son’s kindergarten class autumnal cookies that were leaves in three different shapes and colors, complete with “veins” piped on, which were returned to me intact because they forgot they were there, had too many cookies anyway, and then thought these were too pretty to waste on a bunch of kindergarteners.).
13 Mar 2008 at 1:35 pm
Oh, this cracked me up. I had no idea Irish people actually would recognize the whole Lucky-Charms-and-Shamrocks shtick. How funny that St. Patrick’s Day is now acknowledged in Ireland!!!
Next year if you’re stumped, you can, of course, make…snakes. That’s what we always thought it was about — the guy that chased out the snakes. I don’t know why there were bits of clover to begin with…
13 Mar 2008 at 4:15 pm
No, no - fondant goes on biscuits over here? Really? That’s … well, foreign.
And I think that the snakes which were driven out were actually druid priests or something, weren’t they? To make snakes … well, it’d be very new-age, I suppose.
15 Mar 2008 at 3:44 pm