Disney Day with Brown Sugar Cookies

Sun­day I chillaxed with some girls, watch­ing Dis­ney movies.  We’ve all been run­ning on empty, so one of my friends invited us over to just watch our favorite car­toons and veg.  We were also sup­posed to dis­cuss A Clock­work Orange, but strangely that didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the day.  I’ll try to make up for that by writ­ing about it later on this week.

For my con­tri­bu­tion I brought cook­ies.  They’re from a super sim­ple recipe from an old cook­book.  I was (am) low on gro­ceries, and didn’t really have enough white sugar or milk or all sorts of ingre­di­ents for most of my recipes, so I went off search­ing and found some­thing that was brown sugar based and wouldn’t require a whole lot of impro­vis­ing.   The cook­ies were a hit, and the book is out of cir­cu­la­tion now.  It’s a shame to let some­thing so sim­ple and yet so yummy go to waste.  Plus, I was asked for the recipe.  Here you go!

From A Col­lec­tion Of The Very Finest Recipes Ever Assem­bled Into One Cook­book, 1979:

Brown Sugar Cookies

Ingre­di­ents

• 1 cup shortening
• 2 cups light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 table­spoons water
• 2 tea­spoons vanilla
• 3 1/2 cups flour
• 2 tea­spoons bak­ing powder
• 1 tea­spoon bak­ing soda
• 1 tea­spoon salt
• 1 tea­spoon cinnamon

Direc­tions

1. Cream short­en­ing and sugar; add eggs, water and vanilla.
2. Sift dry ingre­di­ents and mix well.
3. Shape into cookies.
4. Bake 8 to 10 min­utes at 350°.

Note: A vanilla or caramel icing is good; or sprin­kle brown sugar or coconut on top before baking.

Maybe you can already tell that they’re basi­cally a cookie-biscuit hybrid.  Yum!  I didn’t have enough short­en­ing or but­ter to com­plete the recipe, so I subbed but­ter for half the short­en­ing.  (I’ll get gro­ceries soon, I promise!)  The photo I’d planned is unavail­able due to their nom­mi­ness, so I’ll describe them.  I could have gone the cookie cut­ter route because the bat­ter would have been per­fect for that, but instead I made table­spoon sized balls that I flat­tened with a spoon and topped them with green sugar crys­tals.  Visu­ally, they were rather bor­ing, being a dark beige color.  They really would have ben­e­fited from nice con­trast­ing icing or more col­or­ful sprinkles.

What’s your favorite Dis­ney movie?  I’m not really sure what mine is, but I picked Sleep­ing Beauty.  I par­tic­u­larly love the styl­ized look of that one, plus Malef­i­cent is one of the best UBGs* ever! I’m glad that I picked that one, too, because we grav­i­tated towards newer ones for the rest of the day.   After skip­ping the tele­vi­sion for a week, five movies was quite a pen­du­lum swing.  A full 24 hours later, my brain is still stuck singing Dis­ney lyrics, espe­cially Beauty and The Beast.   Some­times you just need a day to zone out and eat junk.

*Ulti­mate Bad Guy (aka Big Bad or Boss Monster)