Usually, mushroom cookies are made for Christmas. This is a wonderful delicacy, colorful and tasty, which looks great on the table and as a gift. Mushrooms can be made using a variety of recipes, but three general principles of how to prepare them remain the same.
General principles of creating "mushrooms"
The first method - the hats and legs are baked separately, and then connected with sweet glaze
Making mushrooms without a shape is quite simple. In order to end up with a sweet fungus, you do not need to suffer, doing sculptural modeling from dough. Balls are made from one part of it, which, when baked, will become flat on the bottom side, and the second part should be rolled into thin stems and cut into pieces of the desired length, as in the photo. Then, in the bottom of each hat, a hole is cut out with a knife for the diameter of the leg, glaze or melted chocolate is poured into it and the leg is neatly attached. After that, you need to decompose the mushrooms and let the glaze dry.
Then the cap of each fungus must be immersed in the prepared icing - it can be white cream with food dyes, sugar-egg confectionery icing for cakes, chocolate. After this painstaking procedure for the final preparation of the cookies, you need to decompose the fungi again and let the caps dry.
Mushrooms in glaze with the addition of red dye (or beet juice), sprinkled with poppy seeds, look especially impressive. It turns out wonderful bright "fly agaric" that any child will like. The legs can also be processed in a similar way, dipping each in a frosting, poppy-sugar mixture, or even collecting several mushrooms in one sweet basket filled with cream.
The second method is cookies in the form of champignons, the legs of which are “squeezed out” in dough balls before baking.
Any shortbread dough is best for these cookies. It needs to be divided into small pieces, each of which is rolled into a ball. Having laid out the balls on a baking sheet, you need to carefully, without piercing the dough to the end, squeeze out a kind of leg in the center of each of them, as in the photo. A tube-shaped object is best for this, such as the neck of a plastic bottle or a clean medicine bottle. Before each extrusion, the object must be dipped in chocolate icing or just in cocoa powder. Now you can bake cookies and, if you wish, again decorate the hats with something sweet.
The third way is baking in tins
There are many "decorating" devices for confectionery products. Cast iron molds with handles for baking squirrels, mushrooms, nuts; waffle iron; separate devices for baking brushwood and cookies in the form of honey agarics; molds for flat cookies. In these cases, no dough tweaks are required.
Brushwood can be deep-fried in a pan, flat mushrooms can be easily painted by hand, turning them into colorful, funny and tasty "sweets" for children, and halves of nuts from the mold can be easily "turned" into curly hats for baking mushrooms, only the legs will have to be prepared separately.
Cookies "Mushrooms" with almonds and candied fruits (for flat molds)
Separately combine half a cup of chopped candied fruits and almonds with a glass of flour, a bag of baking powder and a pinch of salt in a cup. Beat the egg separately, 1 table. l. water and a glass of powdered sugar. Then put it all together and knead a smooth dough, which should be left in the refrigerator for 4 hours.
Then, after heating the oven to 350 degrees, roll out the dough half a centimeter thick and cut out the molds. Oven baking will take about 10 minutes (until golden brown). The size of mushrooms baked in the oven from flat dough can be very different, and it is better to cook large and small separately. While the cookies are cooling, you need to prepare the icing.
In a saucepan, bring half a glass of sugar to a boil, 5 tablespoons. tablespoons of water, cool, grease cookies with this mass. Bring separately to a boil and cook until lightly thickened (about 5 minutes) 5 tablespoons. l. beet juice and half a glass of sugar. This should only lubricate the “caps” of the cookies, reheating the mixture if it thickens from cooling. Let dry for about two hours.
Then apply the final touch - whisk half a cup of caster sugar and egg white until smooth, fold into a bag, cut off a small corner and apply white patterns to the cookies. However, you can dream up by painting cookies with different colors using food and natural dyes, using poppy seeds, decorative confectionery powder and fondants.
Recipe "Mushrooms" with mayonnaise for hazel
Many housewives still have an old Soviet hazel pan with the shape of nuts, squirrels, cockerels and mushrooms, in which you can bake cookies right on the stove. Such lucky ones can try to cook "mushrooms" from the original dough, which includes mayonnaise.
To make cookies, you will need one third of a glass of sugar and starch, 100 grams of mayonnaise and butter, a pinch of soda (extinguish), 2 eggs and about 2-3 glasses of flour. Beat eggs and sugar first, then add everything else except flour. Stir until smooth, then, gradually adding flour, knead the dough for baking nuts and mushrooms.
Before preparing the mushrooms, the mold must be well warmed up and all the grooves must be greased with vegetable oil. Fill the molds to about two-thirds of their volume. Hazel mushrooms go well with boiled condensed milk and chocolate, which can be used to decorate cookies.
"Honey mushroom" cookies, recipe for molds
If you have an original mold in the form of a metal carved umbrella on a thin leg, you can cook confectionery mushrooms in the form of honey agarics. The cookie dough recipe is quite simple, it requires a minimum of ingredients: a couple of eggs, 3 tablespoons of sugar, 4 tablespoons of flour and 1/4 tsp. quenched soda. If you want chocolate mushrooms, you can add some cocoa powder to the dough. Traditionally, beat the egg with sugar first, and then add flour and baking soda to this mass. The consistency of the dough should be about the same as thick kefir.
In a deep frying pan, heat the vegetable oil in such an amount that it calmly covers the "hat" of the form, which, by the way, also needs to be heated in hot oil. Dip the mold into the dough and immediately lower it into the pan.
The mushrooms are instantly reddened and can be removed. Ready and already cooled mushrooms should be sprinkled with powdered sugar or a mixture of powder and cocoa.
Funny meringue mushrooms (meringue)
For those who want something truly original and difficult, you can offer an unusual photo recipe for baking meringue mushrooms. To prepare a small batch, you need 2 chilled proteins, half a cup of powdered sugar, 1/8 teaspoon of salt and 1/8 teaspoon of Cream of Tartar, a protein stabilizer. However, you can do without it.
Beat the mixture with a mixer on high speed for about 7 minutes, until it is glossy. Then the meringues need to be transferred into two pastry bags with different holes - thinner and wider. Distribute the mass in packages on two baking sheets and bake the mushrooms according to the first method - "pull" the legs into small pyramids with a package, where the hole is narrow, and try to make the caps wide, smoothing the "droplet" extended from above with a damp brush.
Then you need to let the merengue cool, poke holes in the bottom of each hat and connect them to the legs with melted chocolate.
Ready-made mushrooms can be lightly sprinkled with cocoa, chocolate or coconut chips. Poppy will be out of place here. And don't forget - meringues are not refrigerated. Place the finished cookies in an airtight container, where they will stay fresh for several days.
