Aquarium Cookies
There’s been a video circulating around Facebook recently on making “aquarium cookies.”
My roommate Sandra and I decided to try making them for our alley (hallmates) during midterms weekend as a kind of pick-me-up.
Components: Sugar cookie rings, jolly rancher “glass” centers, sprinkles, melted white chocolate for icing/glue in assembling the cookie sandwich.
The first step was to make the sugar cookie dough and chill it for at least 30 minutes. We added the proper amounts of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, and put the dough in the fridge for several hours while we went to various meetings and then dinner. The dough was, for some reason, as hard as a rock when we took it out again, and a bit crumbly. There wasn’t a rolling pin to be found, but being the resourceful college students we were, we improvised by using my aluminum water bottle as a rolling pin.
We painstakingly cut out rings of the dough and baked them for approximately 10 minutes, according to instructions. Then came the part I was most excited about: making the glass windows of the aquarium out of melted jolly rancher. We placed the candies in the center of each ring and put them back in the oven for about 4 more minutes.
They bubbled when we first took them out, but the bubbles subsided quickly.
For the sake of organization, we paired the cookies according color (it also looked quite lovely).
To replicate the fish swimming around in a real aquarium, we added colored granulated sugar and star-shaped sprinkles to one of the cookies in each pair.
We melted a bowl of white chocolate chips and cemented each pair together.
The verdict on taste? Better than expected. The expectation was a sugar-bomb, but in reality the shortbread-sugar cookie flavor paired well with the white chocolate and the candy, which tasted like jam. I almost felt like I was eating one of my favorite jam-centered, cream-filled cookie sandwiches from the supermarket.
Took us at least 4 hours in total to make, so would not recommend unless you have time. Still, I think one of the advantages of living in this modern era is all of these great Tasty and Buzzfeed videos coming up with super aesthetic foods, and being able to replicate them at home if one wishes to do so.
Till next time!
Anita
