Ice-Cream Cookies perfect for children's birthdays and special occasions

'Being from Leigh-on-Sea, right on the seafront, I’ve got a soft spot for seaside-themed cookies and cakes.' says Fancy Nancy boutique cakeshop owner Juliet Sear. 'I love the jauntiness of seaside stuff! I am also a bit obsessed with Rossi’s, a famous ice-cream parlour on the seafront. So it didn’t take me long to come up with the idea for these fabulous fun cookies.'

Play about with the colours and sprinkles to make really them your own super sundaes.

Making the ice-cream Cookies

Ingredients (makes around 12 ice-cream shaped cookies)

• 100g unsalted butter
• 100g caster sugar
• 275g plain flour
• 1 medium egg
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 190C/170C Fan/Gas Mark 5.
2. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper
3. Soften the butter at room temperature. Cream it with the sugar in a mixing bowl
4. Beat the egg and then and slowly add to the mixture
5. Add the vanilla essence
6. Stir in the flour and then bring together to form a dough
7. Lightly flour a work surface and then roll out the dough to a thickness of around 1cm.
8. Use an ice-cream cone shaped cookie cutter to create your biscuits
9. Place on the tray and bake for 8-10 minutes or until lightly golden brown.

Decorating the cookies

Ingredients

• Royal icing - you can buy royal icing or follow Mary Berry's royal icing recipe
• Food colouring to colour the icing
  • orange, blue and yellow food colouring for the caramel colour
  • pink, yellow and green for other icing
• Piping bags with No. 3 nozzle and star nozzles
• Multi-coloured sprinkles and chocolate vermicelli

Method

Step 1 Carefully mix orange and blue food colouring to a quarter of the royal icing. Carefully add yellow food colouring to create a caramel-coloured icing.

Step 2 Divide the remaining icing into four sections. Colour one pale pink, one pale yellow, one mint-green and leave one white.

Step 3 To create the waffle-effect cones, put the No.3 nozzel on the piping bag and use the caramel-coloured royal icing to pipe around the edge of the lower cone section of each cookie.

Step 4 Next, pipe parallel diagonal lines across the cones, from one side to the other, in one direction only. Then pipe parallel diagonal lines in the opposite direction to create the lattice effect of a waffle cone. It doesn’t matter if it’s not neat at the top; in fact, continue the cone up a little into the ice-cream section, as this will later get covered over with the swirly ‘ice cream’.

Step 5 Using one colour per cone, use the star nozzle to pipe the pink, yellow, green and white royal icing onto the top part of the cookies to form the ‘ice cream’. (Or you could choose to do a three-colour ice cream to create a Neapolitan effect!) Start at the bottom, next to the cone, and pipe in a sweeping motion from one side to the other, then back again, all the way up until you have filled the space with swirled-effect horizontal lines. Finish with a peak at the top by pulling the nozzle away from the cookie while still squeezing for a moment.

Step 4 Cover with sprinkles – multi-coloured ones on the pink and yellow ice creams and chocolate ones on the green ice cream to suggest mint choc-chip. Enjoy!