Captain America & Winter Soldier Sugar Cookies

Ever since I saw this video, I'd been longing to create my own Captain America shield cookies.  To spice things up a little, I thought I'd also attempt Winter Soldier cookies inspired by Bucky's metal arm.

While I made these cookies with only cookie dough and food colouring, the same effect could be achieved by using coloured royal icing - however, I find that the cookie-only method provides a seamless blend between the colours and looks nice and natural.  I absolutely adore the way that they turned out!

I hope that you'll enjoy seeing how I created these cookies.  This simple sugar cookie recipe can also be used as a base for so many different creations.

Recipe adapted from: Gorgeous Biscuits by Family Circle
Ingredients
125g butter
125g caster sugar
1 egg
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
250g flour
2 tsp baking powder

Method - basic sugar cookies
1. Preheat the oven to 180 C (355 F).  Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

2. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until combined.

3. Fold in the flour and baking powder until a soft dough forms.

4. At this point, you can colour the dough with food colouring if you like.
Then, roll the dough between two sheets of baking paper until it's about 5 mm thick.  Cut out your desired shapes with cookie cutters, place the cookies spread out on a baking tray and bake for about 12-15 minutes (until the cookies are light golden brown).

Method - Captain America shield & Winter Soldier cookies
The basic method I followed is shown here by Rosanna Pansino making Captain America ice cream sandwiches.  I definitely recommend watching the video to get a visual idea of what I did, though I'll go through it step by step below.

I started by making a double batch of dough, then dividing my dough into portions.  The smallest was coloured blue, medium amounts coloured black and grey, a medium amount left white and the largest amount coloured red.  To create the grey, I just used a small amount of black food colouring. 

I rolled small portions of the dough out and used a small star cookie cutter to make the stars for the centre of the cookies.  I baked these first so that I knew what size I needed to make the circle parts of the cookies.

To make the main part of the Captain America cookies, I rolled the blue dough into a log about the size of the star.  I froze the log while I mixed an egg white with a small splash of water to make an egg wash so all my different colours stuck together properly.

I rolled out some of the red dough into a sheet, then brushed the dough with a small amount of egg wash and rolled it around the blue log.  I put that in the freezer and repeated the process for the white and the rest of the red, until finally I had a complete log!  (For the Winter Soldier, I followed the same method with the grey and black dough).

I let that freeze some more, trying to take the log out and roll it every now and then to keep from forming a flat side.  You can also freeze it in a hand towel roll or something of the sort if you have it on hand so that it can rest in something curved.

After the logs had hardened sufficiently (I left mine in the freezer for a few hours while I went to work), I used a large, sharp knife to cut them into slices about 5 to 6 mm thick.  I baked the cookies for about 15 minutes.  The baking process made them spread out a bit and form nice circles when, as you can see from the photo above, they were far from perfect right after they were cut.

Once the cookies were cooled, I attached the stars.  I recommend using royal icing for this part, as it will ensure you get a cement-like seal and the stars won't go anywhere.

I'm rapt with how these cookies turned out - they were exactly how I wanted them to be and they looked amazing!