~ Frosted Cranberry Orange Cut-out Cookies

Modified from:
Allrecipes

Ingredients:
225 g butter, softened
125 g icing sugar
310 g cake flour 
3 tbsp milk
0.5 tsp vanilla essence
0.5 tsp orange essence
2 tbsp chopped dried cranberries
1.5 tbsp orange rind

125 g icing sugar
2 tbsp orange juice
0.5 tsp vanilla essence
0.25 tsp orange essence

Steps:
1) Cream butter with sugar.
2) Mix in milk, essences, cranberries and orange rind.
3) Fold in the flour, 1/3 at a time. Add till a pliable dough is formed.
4) Roll into desired thickness and bake at 170 deg C to brown, approximately 10 min for 1.5"x1.5"x0.25" cookies. 
5) Combine icing sugar, orange juice and essences to form a smooth liquid and frost cooled cookies.

Remarks:
I couldn't form the dough after dumping in all the flour, so I added more till I could get a pliable dough. Think it took like another 150-200 g of cake flour to get it right! Probably some people might want to freeze the dough instead of adding more flour, but since I'm lazy, I'll just add more flour to save the hassle of freezing my dough. This step somehow didn't thwart the cookies which turned out crispy on the outside and slightly cake-like on the inside. Here's a tip: To prevent the cookies from spreading, I put my cut-outs in the fridge before baking and used cool baking trays.

The cookies themselves aren't really sweet, since icing sugar is used. With the frosting, things just got sweeter and livelier (that's what I think). And one can't really go wrong with the combination of cranberries and orange isn't it? They complement each other on their appearance and taste, yummy! 

The adorable shape makes each cookie more appealing doesn't it? I got the Doraemon cookie cutter (review) on Ebay at USD $2.65, or alternatively, you can get one here at $7.50.