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World Cup Sugar Cookies

By the time this is posted, one team has already been eliminated from the tournament. 

I blame my poor time management on my husband (of course) who told me that the first game of the semifinals was on Wednesday, not Tuesday. 

(Let’s not focus on the fact that there are plenty of other, more credible, sources of World Cup scheduling information that are easy to come by.)

Regardless, I have been excited to make these cookies since the World Cup started. We are avid soccer football fans in this household, so we have watched just about every weekend game, and some of the weekday games. 

While our team (zie Germans) didn’t get very far this year, we have enjoyed watching some old and new favorites duke it out on the pitch. It’s also been fun for me to sit back and relentlessly mock the players who seem to get hurt so easily (<cough>Neymar). 

But I better not waste any more time or else another team will have been eliminated by the time I get around to showing you how I made these fun World Cup sugar cookies. 

Supplies and Recipes

For these cookies, you will need:

  • Cookies cut into circles, jerseys/shirts, and a speech bubble.
  • Royal icing in black (both piping and flood), white, red, blue (light and dark), and yellow
  • A print out image of a soccer ball approximately the same size as your cookie
  • Plain white tissue paper
  • Food marker
  • Piping bags or zip-top bags
  • Toothpick or scribe tool

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How to Make Them

Oddly enough, the soccer balls were the hardest of the cookies to make. Something about the combination of pentagons and hexagons makes it really hard to draw freehand. 

Fortunately, I have a trick to getting the perfectly patterned soccer ball: tracing!

You can see in the video that I use a piece of tissue paper to trace over the image with a food marker. Then I trace the tracing (follow me?) onto the cookie through the tissue. 

I have better pictures to demonstrate the technique here. 

Other than the soccer balls, the rest of the cookies were pretty straightforward. The jerseys can be as simple or as detailed as you’d like. You can see I added some additional details to the emblems, but that certainly isn’t necessary. 

So, who do you think is going to win the whole thing? I don’t really want to jinx anything, but I think it will be one of these four teams.

 

Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls

Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls

One of our new favorite weeknight meals is my friend Michelle’s slow-cooker buffalo chicken. It’s easy. It’s actually pretty healthy. And it makes enough food to feed us for days. A couple weeks ago, I made a big batch of the buffalo chicken and had so much left over I had to find something else to do with it other than eat it on a piece of lettuce. 

Enter the egg roll wrapper. 

We have used egg roll wrappers to transform many of our favorite recipes, from chicken tacos, to teriyaki chicken, lasagna, you name it. Why not stuff some buffalo chicken in there, too?

Well, that was probably the best decision ever! The egg roll wrappers transformed the buffalo chicken into these perfectly portioned appetizers. They were a little bit easier to eat, a lot less messy, and were the perfect size to dip into some Ranch dressing. 

I will warn you, the egg roll wrappers do take some getting used to. You have to roll it just right to make sure none of the filling falls out. I like to roll mine on the bias, so that I start with one corner rolling to the opposite. Tucking in the sides is key. 

To make these a bit healthier (and because I wouldn’t know how to fry them if I tried), we bake these in the oven. I like to line them up on a cooling rack stacked on top of a cookie sheet. I brush them down with a bit of oil, then pop then in the oven until they are brown and crispy.

Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls

Like I said, they would make a great game-day appetizer, but we also love to eat these as our main meal. Three to four egg rolls is just the right amount for me and is perfectly satisfying along with some veggies or a salad. My husband can definitely put back a couple more. I also feel like kids would really like these, too. You could probably sneak some veggies into the egg roll and they would never know the difference. 

 

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

GAME DAY SNACK: Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls

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Carolina Panthers Cookies

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I will be the first to admit that I am a bit of a bandwagon Carolina Panthers fan. You see, I grew up in San Diego and have been an avid Charger fan my entire life. It’s been a little hard for me to give up my allegiance. But now after being in Charlotte for three years, after some pretty outstanding Panthers seasons, it’s kind of hard NOT to be a Panthers fan. 

Now that they are going to the Super Bowl…well, make room folks, I am jumping on that bandwagon with both feet! So it only seems natural that I would resort to making some Carolina Panthers cookies for our watch party celebrations, right?

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A few weeks ago I had every intention of making two different designs of football cookies, one for each of the Super Bowl bound teams. But once the Panther’s made it in (and also because Denver is an AFC rival of San Diego), I put all my effort making blue, black, and silver cookies just for them. Panthers Cookies B-5

I had made Super Bowl cookies last year that turned out rather well, so I used the lessons I learned on that project to make these helmet and jersey cookies. To get the logo just right, I traced it on parchment paper with the icing, then let the icing dry overnight. The next day, I flooded the helmets with grey icing, and placed the logo on the wet icing right where I wanted it. Panthers Cookies B-6

The jerseys were much easier since there was no logo on these guys. I started by flooding the jersey in either black, white, or blue. I added the contrasting stripes on the sleeves, then let it dry for a few hours (about 4). Once it was dry, I etched the number and the name on the cookie with my scribe tool so I could easily trace over it with the icing. 

See my whole process here:


 

Also, if you plan on making any football cookies at some point, a word of advice. Make sure you bake your helmets so that they are facing the right way. I made about a dozen helmet cookies. How many could I actually use? FOUR! The other eight were all facing the other direction and I didn’t have a logo that faced the other way either. Oh well, you live and you learn. 

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These wouldn’t only be cute for the Super Bowl, but come college football season, you could make these for your favorite college team, too! Remember, you can bake the cookies ahead of time and freeze them for a couple weeks. Just make sure they are securely sealed in a zip-top bag. 

Hope you all have a great Super Bowl Sunday (if you even care about the Super Bowl). And GO PANTHERS!!!

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Cheese Stuffed Pretzel Bites

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As a kid, my dad and I would often go to baseball and football games together. It was one of our favorite things to do together and it’s what instilled in me my love of sports. My favorite thing about these outings was the food. At home, my mom made me eat pretty healthy, but at the ball game, with dad, there were no rules!

The best were those giant pretzels with the “cheez” sauce. You know what I am talking about! Those pretzels, to me, are the epitome of game-day food. 

For the Conference Championship game last week, some friends of ours had a watch party and asked us all to bring football themed appetizers. I had made these pretzel bites before and was looking for a reason to make them again, so this seemed like the perfect one. To push them over the top and really pack the extra football-food punch, I threw in some cheese!

But serving some sort of fake “cheese” like substance on the side didn’t sounds as appetizing now as it did when I was a kid. So instead of making a cheese dip on the side, I put the cheese right in the middle of the pretzel!

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I even did some testing to figure out the best way to put the cheese in the middle and keep the cheese in the middle. Turns out, it’s best if the cheese is frozen before you wrap it in dough, instead of cool or at room temperature. Go figure. 

Now if you have never made pretzels before, this might seem a little daunting. I would love to tell you how easy it is (I feel like I say everything is easy), but this can get somewhat complicated and there are a few steps involved. But they are sooooo worth it! There is nothing like a fresh, homemade pretzel. Those ball park pretzels have nothing on these bad boys!

As you might have guessed, it all starts with the dough. If you have made bread or pizza crust before, pretzel dough is very similar. Mix together yeast, sugar, water, flour, salt and you’ve got yourself some pretzel dough!

The tricky part comes after you get the dough mixed and proofed. What worked for me, is sectioning the risen dough off into 1 ounce pieces (I use a kitchen scale to get them all around 1 ounce). I then flattened the dough into a disk and placed a small piece of frozen cheese in the middle and then sealed the dough around the cheese. (Side Note: I used cheese curds because my grocery store had them, but you could use just plain cheddar cheese cubes, or your favorite hard cheese)

Pretzel Bites-8 Pretzel Bites-9

After each dough ball was stuffed with cheese, I place it on a baking sheet to wait for it’s boil. Yes, you read me right! You have to boil these little suckers in some baking soda water before you bake them. It’s very similar to what you would do with bagels to get that brown crust that pretzels are known for. (Unfortunately there is no picture of this step since it was hectic enough trying to babysit pretzel balls in some boiling water).

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After their boil, I put them back on the baking sheet, then brushed them with some egg wash and sprinkled on that characteristic salt. Now it’s time for the oven!

Pretzel Bites-11

You know they are ready when they are nice and golden brown. Some of mine split a bit to expose their white inner pretzel layer. Some even split open a bit too much and oozed out their cheese. Oops!

Regardless, they were equally delicious!! I recommend serving them either right out of the oven, or at least warmed up to 300 degrees so that the cheese in the middle is a bit melty. Although my husband has some cold and said they were still good.

Pretzel Bites-10

Gahhhh…look at that cheese!!! Of course I couldn’t eat these since I was on the silly Whole 30 diet, but I did watch my husband while he ate it and had him explain to me everything that he was tasting (the Whole 30 makes you do weird things). You should have seen the smile on his face when he told me how good they were. I could tell immediately without even tasting them that they were pure pretzel perfection!

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You better believe that I will be making these again for the Super Bowl. Everyone at our previous watch party loved and devoured them, so I know they will enjoy some more. I would highly recommend these for your Super Bowl party, too! I would encourage you to plan this out in advance, and maybe make your dough a day ahead so that you have less to do the day of. Just a suggestion! 

Hope you all have great Super Bowl parties and GO PANTHERS!!

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