Remember those chalky Necco hearts that say super sweet things like "Be Mine"? What about biting into a "Go Balls Deep" delicious sugar cookie? Back in the olden days of the early 2000s when I was swinging single and had a crappy low-paying job, my friend came up with a way to uncelebrate Valentine's Day: Dirty Cookie night.
It was all good until my roommate's dad showed up the morning after our sugar orgy when most of our cookies were still laid out on the kitchen counter. How to explain the "Lick Me" cookie to dear old dad? Thankfully now that we're a bit older having "the talk" over a "Grab My Ass" treat doesn't happen as much. But that didn't stop Dirty Cookie night! Here's how to have one of your own.
How to make the cookies:
With your mixer, cream:
2/3 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp, vanilla
Once the mixture is creamed (tee hee hee):
add 1 egg
and beat until light and fluffy.
Mix in 4 tsp. milk.
In a separate bowl, sift together:
2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
Combine flour mixture with butter mixture. Divide the dough in half. Turn the dough onto a piece of waxed paper and form a tube or a ball. Wrap each half of the dough individually in the paper and chill for at least an hour.
Preheat the oven to 375-degrees. On a floured surface, roll out half the dough until it's about 1/8" thick. Keep the other half of the dough chilled until you are ready to use it.
With a heart-shaped cookie cutter, cut out your cookies. Ball up your leftover dough and roll it again to make more cookies until you run out of dough. Then grab the leftover dough in the refrigerator and repeat.
Bake them for 6 to 8 minutes, or until they are browned slightly on the edges. Let the cookies sit on the cookie sheet until they firm up. Cool them on a rack.
These cookies look so innocent. Any grandma would be happy to serve these precious treats to her grandchildren. However, these are not grandma's cookies, and after your dirty cookie night, you may not be able to look grandma in the eye.
Time to sweeten these up with a little frosting. I make mine using a mixture of powdered sugar and milk -- and a tsp. of vanilla. Basically, I start with about a cup-and-a-half of powdered sugar and add the milk one tablespoon at at time until the mixture becomes a thick liquid (kind of like the consistency of Elmer's glue). Then I add the vanilla and some food coloring.
The easiest way to frost the cookies is to drizzle it on with a spoon and use the back of the spoon to push it to the edges. Once all the cookies are frosted, let them dry. This can take a little time, so you may want to do this before your guests arrive.
To add the letters, make a pastry bag out of a baggie by cutting a tiny hole in the corner. Make your frosting as you did before, but leave out the vanilla and add less milk for a thicker consistency.
I always get stuck writing the dirty phrases on the cookies because I make the letters the neatest (none of us are pastry chefs). This was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I've amassed a delicious dirty talk vocabulary over the last couple of Valentine's Days. But on the other hand, while everyone was enjoying cocktails and having fun, I was decorating cookies. Now everyone takes turns. It's not like you'll be selling these at a bake sale, so it really doesn't matter how perfect the writing looks. It's just fun to have a dirty mouth -- literally.
I promise, Dirty Cookie night is a hysterical (and educational) tradition. Even your friends who're stuck with a date on V Day will want to get in on the naughty nibbles action. After doing this for years, though, we need some new freaky messages for our frosting. What's your favorite sexy two word phrase?
