Friday Food Craft: Deathly Hallows Brown Sugar Shortbread

For our Harry Potter edition of Friday Food Craft we have some super yummy Shortbread cookies made to look like the Deathly Hallows symbol (the triangle represents the cloak, the circle is the stone and the line is the wand). I chose to cut out my cookies into triangle shapes and then press in the circle and line with the back of a knife, and a bottle cap (washed, of course). You could just as easily cut out circle or squares and draw on a symbol with some frosting or chocolate. Yum!

To make these cookies (with or without Harry Potter theme) you will need:

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

That's it! You could probably add some lemon zest or the inside of a vanilla bean if you are feeling a little fancy, but these are tasty on their own, and the brown sugar rather than white sugar gives them a little added something.

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (or just use a hand mixer and a bowl of your choosing) whip together your butter and brown sugar. Then, slowly add in your flour until incorporated.

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth, this doesn't take more than 30 seconds to a minute. Roll out your dough to about 1/3" thick, and cut out using your desired shape cookie cutter.

I have been known to roll my dough into a log shape, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it when I'm not making fancy cookies. Then all you have to do is take the log out of the refrigerator, cut off discs about 1/3" thick and place them on a cookie sheet, and you can keep re-wrapping it to only make a few cookies at a time!

Place onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake these in your 300 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes, until slightly golden.

Allow to cool slightly then transfer to a wire rack and cool completely.

As with all shortbread, you can eat them plain, give them a sweet frosting glaze, or sandwich them together with some chocolate or caramel! This is really a quick and delicious recipe, one of my favorites!

The Dark (book)Mark

Back with another Harry Potter themed craft today. This one is easy and inexpensive, and you can get as detailed as you like with it! Since Harry Potter is first and foremost a character from a book, not a movie, I decided to make a bookmark that you could use while reading the books (as I do time and again and am reminded how inferior the movies really are).

I decided to make my bookmark out of "The Dark Mark" from the movies, and I did a Google image search to find and print out the graphic so I could trace around it with an Xacto knife to make my pattern. You can cut out as much of the detail as you like, or just do a simple silhouette of the general shape to make your own bookmark. I made mine out of some dark green pearlized card stock. I definitely recommend card stock, as it is nice and sturdy, and comes in a variety of colors and finishes.

You could also put your card stock straight into the printer and print your image onto that and cut around the outside to make a bookmark with greater detail and less time commitment! I only recommend this on lighter colored paper, of course, and you may want to laminate your final bookmark so the ink doesn't rub off onto your book or fingers. You could cover it with contact paper, but that doesn't yield the same quality.