Snowflake Cookies

This recipe is from "The Little Book of Christmas Cooking". It is full of these great little recipes designed for kids to do with adults, with easy step by step instructions. - Keep the cookies in an airtight container and eat them within a week. These little cookies look great when you draw different designs on them with regular and sparkly icing. I suggest using those prepackaged tubes of fine point icing for these cookies, but feel free to use any icing you want to. You will need to have something to pipe the cing on with. You will also need a 2 1/2 inch round cookie cutter for this.

• Ready In: 42 mins
• Yields: 1 dozen

Ingredients

• 6  tablespoons butter, softened
• 1⁄4 cup powdered sugar
• 1  cup all-purpose flour
•  white  icing (for writing)
•  oil (to grease pans)

Directions

1. Before you start, grease two cookie sheets with cooking oil.
2. Put the butter into a bowl and stir until it is creamy. Sift the powdered sugar in and stir until the mixture is smooth.
3. Sift the flour into the bowl and stir it in with a wooden spoon. Then, using your hands, squeeze the mixture to make a dough.
4. Flatten the dough a little before you wrap it. Wrap the dough in plastic food wrap and put it in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. While the dough chills, preheat your oven to 350°F.
5. Dust a rolling pin and a clean work surface with a little flour. Don't use too much or the dough will get tough. Roll out the dough until it is about 1/4 inch thickness.
6. Cut out lots of circles with the cookie cutter, Then, squeeze the scraps into a ball. Roll the ball out again, then cut out more circles.
7. Place the circles onto the greased cookie sheets, about 6 on each. Bake the cookies for about 10-12 minutes.
8. Remove the cookies from the oven and leave them on the sheets for about 2 minutes. Then, move them onto a wire rack using a spatula. Let them cool completely before you ice them.
9. To begin the snowflake design, draw a line down the center of one cookie with the white writing icing. Draw two more lines crossing over the first one, so it sorta looks like an X with a line in the middle.
10. Make the snowflake by adding small likes of writing icing across the ends of the lines. Try making them all a little different, since there are no snowflakes that are exactly alike.