Our first crafter to be featured on Sci-Fi & Scary is Claire Huston. You may know her from Art and Soul, where she posts all sorts of lovely munchies, reviews, and so on. Definitely go have a look after you read this post on space-themed cookies!

Firstly, thank you to Lilyn G. for inviting me to featured here on Sci-fi & Scary. Not only is it an honour, but it also gave me the excuse I’ve been waiting for to make space-themed cookies*.

Space-Themed Cookies

I enjoy baking for lots of reasons. Making cookies is a favourite baking activity because I can make the dough, roll it and cut it out with my 4-year-old son. It’s one of the few “creative” activities he enjoys, mostly I suspect because he knows he’ll get to eat the cookies soon enough.

However, decorating them is an entirely different matter. While I have decorated biscuits with my son, they tend to be simple things involving getting a combination of icing, chocolate and sugar sprinkles all over the place. The reason I like making and decorating more complicated shapes is because it demands my total concentration. Through decorating cookies, I’ve come to understand the current craze for adult colouring books. When I’m icing, using a fine tip and different colours, I can only think about what I’m working on and enter something approaching a meditative state. I’m a constant worrier/over-thinker/day-dreamer and so it’s fantastically relaxing to empty my head and think of nothing more than whether the icing is about to creep over the edge of the cookie.

So there you go: making themed cookies as Zen. Bet you didn’t see that coming 😉

Oh, and of course, the final products of cookie baking and decorating also happen to be delicious as well as cute. You don’t get that from a colouring book.

If you would like to make your own space cookies, here’s the recipe. Of course, you can use whatever shape cookie cutters you have or can find with this cookie dough. The sky’s the limit (yes, pun intended)!

How to make space rocket cookies with stars and planets

Ingredients (makes 30 – 40 cookies depending on how big you cut them)

75 g/ 2.25 oz/ 1 third of a cup butter or margarine

75 g/ 2.25 oz/ 1 third of a cup caster sugar

1 egg

1 tbsp milk (use whichever milk you have)

225 g/ 8 oz/ 2.75 cups plain flour (and a couple of tablespoons extra to dust your board and rolling pin)

1-2 tsp of vanilla essence

For decoration: icing sugar and gel food colourings

Blend the butter and sugar together until smooth. I used my food mixer, but you can use electric hand beaters or elbow grease. Add the milk, vanilla essence and egg. Mix until combined. Add the flour and beat until you have a smooth dough.

Wrap your cookie dough in cling film (aka plastic wrap) and put in the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes. You can leave overnight if you want to use it the next day. I usually try to leave cookie dough to chill for at least 2 hours.

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C (160 fan)/ 350 degrees F / Gas Mark 4.

Sprinkle flour over your board and rolling pin. Roll out the dough until it’s about 3 mm (1/8th inch) thick. Use whatever cookie cutters you like to get your shapes. It was easy to find star and rocket cutters online – there’s quite a bit of choice. I used a glass to cut out the planets.

Put the raw cookies onto trays lined with greaseproof baking paper. Bake for 10-15 minutes until they start to turn brown. Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.

I used ordinary water icing for the decoration. This is just icing sugar and water. I wish I’d written down quantities, but I’ve been doing this a while and tend to do everything by eye (sorry!). The key is to add the water very slowly. If you have four heaped tablespoons of icing sugar in a bowl, begin by adding just a teaspoon of water, blend in, add another half teaspoon of water, etc. You want your icing to be runny enough to pipe, but stiff enough that it’s going to stay put and not run off the cookies. If it goes too runny, don’t panic. Just add another tablespoonful of icing sugar to soak up some of the excess water.

Make each colour as you need it by mixing up some basic white icing and adding gel food colouring and mixing it through until you got the shade you want. Spoon the icing into a piping bag fitted with a small writing tip. This is a piping nozzle with a small round hole (Google “Wilton no. 3 tip” and you’ll see what I mean). Use this fine writing nozzle to pipe outlines around areas which you can then “flood” later by spooning icing into the bordered zones and spreading it out using a toothpick or the point of a knife.

If you want to decorate your rocket cookies as I did, pipe the windows, nose cones and boosters first. Allow them to dry a little (leaving it about 30 minutes will be enough) before filling in the rest of the rocket (the red or white on my cookies). The icing can take a couple of hours to dry completely, so don’t be in a hurry to put them away in a container stacked on top of each other or you will squish all your hard work.

I also sprinkled some edible gold glitter on top of the yellow icing on the star cookies while it was wet.

If you give these space-themed cookies a try I hope they turn out delicious. And if you’re looking for more recipes, check out my blog’s recipe index, where you’ll find links to over 70 easy recipes for cakes, brownies, muffins, cupcakes, cookies and more!

* Actually, being British, I call them biscuits. So every time you read “cookie” in this post, just know I was muttering “biscuit” while writing.

Sci-Fi & Scary: Okay, now I want to make cookies, and I suck at making cookies. I excel only at one thing when it comes to cookies. Eating them!

Seriously, though, Claire is a wonderful person, and someone I’m happy to call a fellow blogger. Go check her site out!

Do you make something cool that you’d like to be featured on Sci-Fi & Scary? Go here to check out the details.