Flag slice-and-bake sugar cookies

Remember those slice-and-bake cookies you used to be able to get from grocery stores around holidays? I used to love having the shapes hidden within and the ease of making them. Just pull the roll of dough out of the freezer, slice, and bake. Not to mention that they cookies were darn tasty too!

I found a few examples online, and decided to make flag cookies. The French and US flag seemed the most obviously appropriate. So, first, the recipe. Any recipe for rolled sugar cookies will work. I actually forgot to add baking powder and salt to mine, and it still worked out just fine.

I mashed up the butter and sugar first. This was quite a workout!! I started with:

And ended up with:

Next, had to add the eggs. I actually scaled the recipe down since I only had three eggs left and the recipe called for four. Oops...

After mixing in all the flour, and realizing that the bowl I had chosen was way too small, I split the dough into three equal parts. I figured that making a block for each flag would work, and that luckily for me, each flag had about the same quantity of each color: red, white, and blue. Adding food coloring works well. Unfortunately I don't have the strong icing food coloring, so my blue turned out blue/green and my red turned out pink.

This is very important. The dough MUST be chilled next. At first I put it in the fridge for an hour, and that still wasn't enough, so I put it in the freezer for half an hour to let it cool further, and then it was about the right texture to roll without sticking.

Now, it was very important to have the thickness of the stripes for the American flag to be the same thickness. Since I don't even have a real rolling pin (I use a well cleaned glass wine bottle), there's no way I have the little rubber spacers that can be attached to your rolling pin. So instead, I used two wire hangers to put on either side of the dough in order to keep the rolling pin/wine bottle from thinning the dough out any further than that.

After the first layer was finished, I put it on a plate and in the freezer while I rolled the next layers. Then I stacked them all one on top of the other and cut the edges square.

The French flag was easier, with three thickly rolled chunks (spacer = textbooks). 

Then back in the freezer to harden up some more. Now I leave it in the freezer wrapped in plastic wrap until I want to make some cookies, when I slice off one or two and pop them in the oven. They cook up nicely in seven minutes at 200 degrees C.