Larfleeze’s Orange Lantern Cookies

Of course I couldn’t resist making Orange Lantern Christmas Cookies when Kevin mentioned them in his recent post. Let this be my warning to you. Resist the temptation. We turned the recipe into an MLD group project and I think the consensus was they were not a recipe to be made again. But hey, we are a group of REALLY picky eaters. Maybe it is just me, but this incredibly easy cookie recipe is not for everyone. I love sweet stuff, and these were just gross. Alright, maybe it was just me… Kevin and Pete didn’t think they were so bad. Pregnancy broke my taste buds a bit.

Ingredients
Bowl One
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 tbsp orange juice concentrate, thawed
1 tsp orange zest
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
Bowl Two
1.5 cups flour
1/2 tsp  Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
dash of salt
Last
1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350˚F. In a mixing bowl, combine butter and sugars until fluffyish. Add the rest of your bowl one ingredients and blend until combined, scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally. Stir together all your Bowl Two ingredients in a separate bowl, and then mix into the larger bowl. Once combined, add the chips. Scoop onto greased cookie sheets and bake for about 10-12 minutes.

While the cookies are cooling, make some icing. Blend together the following until smooth:

2 tbsp orange juice concentrate
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup butter, softened
1.5 cups powdered sugar

Wait until the cookies are cooled to add the icing!! Once they are iced and you are feeling artistic, draw some orange lantern symbols on there with decorating gel. My recommendation… if you can find Orange Cake Mate gel, buy it. It will probably be orange. Don’t buy Better Crocker decorating pens unless you want red or black, because apparently those are the only colors she knows. Thanks to my mad Photoshop skills, they look orange in our post photos.  🙂 I couldn’t, however, save the sorry excuse for purple decorating pen. That’s right, purple. Oh sorry, “indigo” because apparently the pink is “violet”. We decided, since I had all the colors, and Pete had all the rings, it was only appropriate to make the whole set.

If you like the taste of chemicals, decorate away. If you LOVE orange, make these. The icing wasn’t that bad. It tasted like sherbet.  The cookies were not HORRIBLE, but the white chocolate chips made them quite sweet. Icing on cookies is an extreme I can’t handle. Decorating gel is gross, and I may never eat it again. We did have fun though, and everyone had a chance to decorate a few orange lantern cookies. There was extreme hesitation in testing the cookies, and I was the only one willing to show my gel stained teeth on the internet (that is from ONE bite!). If you do make the cookies, please let us know what you think!