Cubicle kitchen: Good Day, Sunshine Cookies

I did quite a bit of baking last week.  Because along with my crumbling jam cookies and oxymoronic garlic cheese bread, I also made some cut-out cookies.  Just give me a poncho and call me Martha!

Of course, I'm sure Martha doesn't start with a recipe from Land O'Lakes, but you work with what you have.  In this case, what I had was a need to make some orange-flavored sugar cookies using cookie cutters.  This was for a swap Mom was doing, themed around ducks.  So what better treat to send than duck-shaped cookies?  And orange because, well, duck a la orange!  Puns are delicious.

I made up the dough, substituting orange extract for the vanilla, and adding in some zest for good measure as well.  After a few hours in the fridge, Mom was in charge of the cut-outs.  She had a hard time working with the dough as time went on, but after she had all the ducks she thought she could fit into her swap box, she made me some circular cookies as well.

I just grabbed that shape because it was the easiest given the rapidly declining workability of the dough.  But when I glazed them, I decided that these weren't just sugar cookies that happened to be orange-y.  No, clearly these were now sunshine cookies.  Orange juice, breakfast, it all made sense.  So along with a mugful of powdered sugar, some orange extract and enough orange juice to get the necessary icing consistency, I added some food coloring to make these a sunshine yellow.  And then I even put a few on a yellow paper plate for you guys for an even sunnier effect.

Are you feelings the rays?  This was another well-received goodie by the co-workers.  Now, I know that people getting free cookies aren't exactly going to criticize them, so each week I'm usually looking for one particular example of someone liking them to make me feel like they aren't just humoring me.  In this case, a co-worker who, like me, counts her calories, had two.  So there you have it.  These cookies have been deemed worth indulging in by someone with high standards.