Leaf Cookies

You can start out with any sugar cookie recipe you like.  We like this one, but we like to add a touch of maple flavor.

We colored the whole dough yellow, with a bit of brown since otherwise the lemony yellow didn't seem very autumnal.

Then we broke off a quarter of the dough into a bag and added some orange, broke off a third, colored the rest with red, than bagged half and colored the remainder a darker red.

 

We chilled the dough for a couple of hours, but since they were all in quart sized bags and flattened for fast chilling, we probably only needed an hour.

At any rate, we put random chunks of each color together on the board, then squished them together a bit before rolling them out.  I've seen it done without squishing and I thought a bit of swirling would make the leaves look more natural.

 

 

One of the surprise benefits was that the leaves looked different on each side!

We looked at each leaf and put our favorite side up.

These two are the same cookie.

They all ended up being super pretty!

Here they are about to go into the oven.

 

 

And here is the finished leaf pile!