Making the perfect Animal Crackers should only take approximately 5 hr 5 min . It’s considered an Easy level recipe. Below are the ingredients and directions for you to easily follow. The Animal Crackers recipe can feed your family for 24 cookies.
There are many different ways to make this Animal Crackers recipe. Once you’re familiar with our recommended ingredients and directions, you can add your own twist to this recipe to make it your own! We’ve also listed potential Cookware items below that might be necessary for this Animal Crackers recipe.
Animal Crackers Popular Ingredients
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 10 tablespoons salted butter, softened
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 large egg
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon whole milk
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 5 drops red food coloring
Steps for making Animal Crackers
- For the dough: Add the granulated sugar and butter to the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until smooth. Add the vanilla and egg and beat again, scraping the sides of the bowl halfway through. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and the milk to the mixer until the dough comes together. Flatten the dough into a disc and put it in a plastic bag. Refrigerate until chilled, about 2 hours.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or baking mats.
- Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick and cut out as many cookies as you can in a variety of animal shapes. Place the cookies on the prepared baking sheets and bake until they’re just barely done, 8 to 10 minutes; you want them to be set, but not brown. Let the cookies cool completely before decorating.
- For the frosting: Sift the powdered sugar into a bowl, add the food coloring and 1/4 cup cold water and stir to combine
- Transfer the cookies to a cooling rack set over a baking sheet and drizzle the frosting over them. Let the frosting dry before serving the cookies, about 2 hours.
Popular Categories for this Recipe
- Baking – Baking is a method of preparing food that uses dry heat, typically in an oven, but can also be done in hot ashes, or on hot stones. The most common baked item is bread but many other types of foods are baked. Heat is gradually transferred “from the surface of cakes, cookies, and breads to their center. As heat travels through, it transforms batters and doughs into baked goods and more with a firm dry crust and a softer center”. Baking can be combined with grilling to produce a hybrid barbecue variant by using both methods simultaneously, or one after the other. Baking is related to barbecuing because the concept of the masonry oven is similar to that of a smoke pit.Because of historical social and familial roles, baking has traditionally been performed at home by women for day-to-day meals and by men in bakeries and restaurants for local consumption. When production was industrialized, baking was automated by machines in large factories. The art of baking remains a fundamental skill and is important for nutrition, as baked goods, especially breads, are a common and important food, both from an economic and cultural point of view. A person who prepares baked goods as a profession is called a baker. On a related note, a pastry chef is someone who is trained in the art of making pastries, desserts, bread and other baked goods.
- Dessert – Dessert (/dɪˈzɜːrt/) is a course that concludes a meal. The course consists of sweet foods, such as confections, and possibly a beverage such as dessert wine and liqueur. In some parts of the world, such as much of Central Africa and West Africa, and most parts of China, there is no tradition of a dessert course to conclude a meal.The term dessert can apply to many confections, such as biscuits, cakes, cookies, custards, gelatins, ice creams, pastries, pies, puddings, macaroons, sweet soups, tarts and fruit salad. Fruit is also commonly found in dessert courses because of its naturally occurring sweetness. Some cultures sweeten foods that are more commonly savory to create desserts.
- Sugar Cookie
- Cookie – A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, nuts, etc.In most English-speaking countries except for the United States, crunchy cookies are called biscuits. Many Canadians also use this term. Chewier biscuits are sometimes called cookies even in the United Kingdom. Some cookies may also be named by their shape, such as date squares or bars.Biscuit or cookie variants include sandwich biscuits, such as custard creams, Jammie Dodgers, Bourbons and Oreos, with marshmallow or jam filling and sometimes dipped in chocolate or another sweet coating. Cookies are often served with beverages such as milk, coffee or tea and sometimes “dunked”, an approach which releases more flavour from confections by dissolving the sugars, while also softening their texture. Factory-made cookies are sold in grocery stores, convenience stores and vending machines. Fresh-baked cookies are sold at bakeries and coffeehouses, with the latter ranging from small business-sized establishments to multinational corporations such as Starbucks.
- Cream Cheese Frosting
- Sugar – Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double sugars, are molecules made of two monosaccharides joined by a glycosidic bond. Common examples are sucrose (glucose + fructose), lactose (glucose + galactose), and maltose (two molecules of glucose). Table sugar, granulated sugar, and regular sugar refer to sucrose, a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose. In the body, compound sugars are hydrolysed into simple sugars.Longer chains of monosaccharides (>2) are not regarded as sugars, and are called oligosaccharides or polysaccharides. Starch is a glucose polymer found in plants, and is the most abundant source of energy in human food. Some other chemical substances, such as glycerol and sugar alcohols, may have a sweet taste, but are not classified as sugar.Sugars are found in the tissues of most plants. Honey and fruit are abundant natural sources of simple sugars. Sucrose is especially concentrated in sugarcane and sugar beet, making them ideal for efficient commercial extraction to make refined sugar. In 2016, the combined world production of those two crops was about two billion tonnes. Maltose may be produced by malting grain. Lactose is the only sugar that cannot be extracted from plants. It can only be found in milk, including human breast milk, and in some dairy products. A cheap source of sugar is corn syrup, industrially produced by converting corn starch into sugars, such as maltose, fructose and glucose.Sucrose is used in prepared foods (e.g. cookies and cakes), is sometimes added to commercially available processed food and beverages, and may be used by people as a sweetener for foods (e.g. toast and cereal) and beverages (e.g. coffee and tea). The average person consumes about 24 kilograms (53 lb) of sugar each year, with North and South Americans consuming up to 50 kilograms (110 lb) and Africans consuming under 20 kilograms (44 lb).As sugar consumption grew in the latter part of the 20th century, researchers began to examine whether a diet high in sugar, especially refined sugar, was damaging to human health. Excessive consumption of sugar has been implicated in the onset of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and tooth decay. Numerous studies have tried to clarify those implications, but with varying results, mainly because of the difficulty of finding populations for use as controls that consume little or no sugar. In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended that adults and children reduce their intake of free sugars to less than 10%, and encouraged a reduction to below 5%, of their total energy intake.
You might need the following Cookware
In this section we’ve listed Cookware items that might be helpful to make this Animal Crackers recipe (or similar recipes). If certain tools or utensils are not applicable, then ignore and choose relevant items.
- Cooking pots
- Frying pan
- Steamers
- Colander
- Skillet
- Knives
- Cutting board
- Grater
- Saucepan
- Stockpot
- Spatula
- Tongs
- Measuring cups
- Wooden Spoon
