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Build Your Own Burger Cookies

It’s burger season! Can I get a whoop whoop? Whoop whoop! Hello daddy’s cooking dinner again – and enjoying it! Ohhhhhhh you thought I was excited about the burgers, and the food. Oh, yea, yea right. I mean the foods great and all, heck the hubs can grill a mean burger. But the real excitement for this mama is the fact that I won’t be cooking dinner multiple times a week. My responsibilities are down to a simple side salad and some veggies. And if I’m feeling really wild, I might even buy paper plates to get me out of dishes too. Which means I can use my spare time to make some hamburger cookies. That’s normal right?

Build Your Own Burger Cookies

Speaking of burgers, I have finally found the perfect vegetarian burger that everybody will totally love at ALL of those BBQ’s this summer. Totally completely meatless, I promise. These burgers are 100% pure dessert. (hey don’t judge they have eggs and eggs = protein) So if your firing up the grill and prepping an awesome sauce BBQ these are the burgers, I mean cookies for you. And let me let you in on a little secret…these cookies are SO simple. For reals, the fun presentation really distracts you from looking at how simple each cookie is. They are the perfect set for a beginner. Before you know it you’ll be deemed King of The Grill AND Queen of The Oven.

For those of you brand new to cookie decorating here are some resources to get your started:

Rolled Cookies 101

Royal Icing 101

Decorating Cookies 101

Before we get to the nitty gritty details I’ll share a bit of info first.

COOKIES

To make these cookies I used both rollout vanilla cookies and rolled out chocolate cookies. For the vanilla cookies I was feeling like trying out Sugarbelle’s awesome recipe which you can find here. I also have my own recipe I use frequently as well as the nitty gritty of how I bake all my cookies here. For the chocolate cookie I used a half batch of my very favorite chocolate recipe from Lila Loa which you can find here. I will explain in the step by step directions exactly how I divided up the 1 batch of sugar cookies to make it work.

Build Your Own Burger Cookies

RECIPES

To color these I used the Wilton’s color right system. I used the exact same ratios for the dough and the royal icing.

COLORS

  • Cheese: 4 drops orange to 3 drops yellow (1/2 cup icing)
  • Tomato: 5 drops red to 1 drop orange (3/4 cup icing)
  • Lettuce: 5 drops yellow to 3 yellow 3 blue (3/4 cup icing)
  • Pickles green: add small bits of left over tomato red to left over lettuce green dough
  • Bun (icing only): 4 drops yellow to 1 cyan (1 cup icing)
  • Chips: 5 drops yellow (1/2)
  • Meat (icing only): lots of brown coloring alone (1 cup icing)

TOOLS

  • rolling pin
  • large circle cutter
  • medium circle cutter
  • clover
  • small scalloped circle cutter
  • square cutter
  • easter egg cutter
  • piping bags
  • small round icing tips
  • Wilton #69 leaf tip
  • food safe paint brush

BAKER’S NOTE: These are pretty standard cutters that most bakers already have, so I didn’t link to specifics. Just play around with what you have till you can make a nice burger. If you’re having trouble with sizes use the cutters to trace out paper burger pieces and see if they stack up nicely in size.

Now that we have that info…let’s get grilling! Or baking!

BAKE HAMBURGER COOKIES

Step 1: Mix up a vanilla cookie dough and a half batch chocolate cookie dough (here!). Place the vanilla cookie dough covered in the fridge.

Step 2: Starting with chocolate, roll out dough and cut “meat” cookies out on parchment paper about 1/4 in thick (I use a guided pin) and bake for 6-8 minutes at 375 depending on your cookie size. (mine were perfect at 7).

Step 2: Split vanilla cookie dough in half and place the second half back in the fridge to keep cool. Roll out your hamburger buns in sets of two (about 8 will do) using the same exact cutter you used for the meat. Bake for 6-8 minutes. (again mine was perfect at 7)

Step 3: Grab any remaining dough and roll it into a log. Cut into 4 equal pieces (chips, cheese, tomato, and lettuce/pickles). Now it’s time to color! In order to get the most out of your dough you will want to color and bake your cookies one color at a time and in this order chips, cheese, tomato, lettuce, then pickles. The reason for this is you will find if you color in this order each left over from the first can go into a color for the next. So after you’ve made a few chips the left over yellow can go into the cheese orange, the leftover orange can go into the tomato red, the after the lettuce is made a small amount of red can go into the lettuce green to make pickles. Brilliant right! After you’ve colored and cut all the cookies ( I store the cookie trays in the fridge while I cut the others) it time to bake them. I baked my cookies 5-7 minutes each. 5 for the small ones like pickles and up to 7 for the tomatoes.

 

MAKE ROYAL ICING

Step 4: Next whip up a batch of royal icing found here which should result in about 5 cups.

Step 5: Go ahead and divide the icing into 7 bowls and cover WELL with plastic wrap. Icing is always an estimate but this is the actual amounts I used for mine. Brown (1 cup), bun color (1 cup) tomato red (3/4 cup), chip yellow ( 1/2 cup), lettuce (3/4 cup) cheese color (1/2 cup). And set aside a little remaining white (about 1/4 cup) to make the black burger details and sesame seeds later on. I always fear running out of frosting. Since this has so many different colored cookies, I went ahead and colored and decorated my cookies one cookie at a time in the same order and just like the dough I added left over frosting the next color. Yay for less waste! In the end I threw the left overs in a bowl and added brown then black to make the meat patties.

DECORATE HAMBURGER COOKIES

Step 6: Frost frost frost frost! For all flooding and outline I used a Wilton tip #2 along with a coupler. With the exception of the lettuce with I used Wilton tip #69. For the texture on the burger I simply swirled the frosting with a paint safe food brush. And then “smoothed” black lines to make the grill marks with a brush as well. For the tomato I outlined the cookie in the darker shade piping icing, filled with a 20 second icing then piped a little of the outline icing inside and swirled with a toothpick. Once dried I piped the little yellow seeds on.

Build Your Own Burger Cookies

Oh man. That was a mouth full! Did you get it all? For being so simple it took a lot of words – but I think I covered every step. But don’t let the long instructions scare you. These were SO much fun to make. And the designs are really simple, as I said about I think this is a perfect begin project. Happy grilling!

Heads up! To keep those legal gurus of the world happy, I need to inform you that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. In short – I may earn a small commission from the use of said link with no cost to you! But don’t worry I only link to stuff I use, love, and know you will too!

Image of Toni Miller in front of a sprinkle shelf.

COOKIE DESIGNER

 I’m Toni, the baker, the blogger,  and cookie cutter maker  behind The Sprinkle Factory and I hope you find a sprinkle of inspiration here at The Factory.

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